Census

A woman rang the doorbell yesterday and identified herself as being part of the U.S. Census bureau. She presented a generic ID badge and began accusing me and my family of being out of compliance with federal law.

Apparently, the Census bureau does not rest on its laurels between ten-year full censuses. It has more frequent surveys sent to randomly selected addresses. On principle, I agree with randomness in doing censuses since watching the West Wing episode dealing with the topic.

It seems, however, that the downstairs apartment was selected. We never received the survey we were supposed to, and instead this woman arrives to accost us for violating federal law. The total interaction should have taken five minutes once she found out the apartment was vacant. Either yes, we need to fill out the form, or no, we don't. Instead, she dithered for twenty minutes that I'll never get back.

She constantly referred to not having to fill out the form as us being "off the hook" as if the $100 fine (which she only alluded to as being legal penalties) were so onerous. Moreover, in order for anything to hold up in the court of law, the government would have to provide evidence that we had received the letter, say in the form of a certified letter. Since we received no letter, no such evidence exists.

The type of information the government requests is also a bit disconcerting. As a well-socialized little cog, I tend to follow government instructions. I have no problem providing numerical information to better allocate resources. Any other information about race, religion, or other data should not be required. It may seem like an overstatement to say that this information may be used to round us all up, I need only point to Japanese Internment. The 1940 census was necessary to forcibly removing all Japanese-Americans. It simply would not have been possible without centralized information that the internees voluntarily (!) offered. And after reading Naomi Wolf's The End of America, and the shift towards fascism, I'm even more unsettled. Constitutionally, the government has no need for this detailed information.