 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The United States Census Bureau is pulling out all the stops. They are determined to achieve a full enumeration of the citizens and residents of this country. We are bombarded by mass media advertisements designed to boost compliance.
The road the census folks have chosen has proven to be a rocky one. Initial mailings had incorrect addresses sporting additional (and erroneous) digits. That other great paragon of governmental efficiency -- the United States Post Office -- however, rose to the rescue and promised to ensure that the census mailings made it to their originally intended households.
Not only was the Census Bureau criticized for their addressing faux pas, many observers questioned the need to announce that the actual census would be arriving within a week or two. Why not simply save costs and just send out the census forms?
When the forms finally did arrive, they came in three flavors: "short," long, and extra-infuriating. The so-called short form asked for the number of occupants, your address, phone number, and a dizzying array of racial options so we could all be appropriately pigeonholed for such glorious programs as affirmative action.
The long form pried, prodded, and probed in astonishingly insulting detail into a blizzard of personal questions. Most of us would be too embarrassed or annoyed to answer such queries if coming from a family member or a friend. For a faceless bureaucracy to lift that curtain on our personal lives revealed a brashness and arrogance breathtaking in its insolence. (The size extra-large form? Don't ask...)
While a judge in Texas has ruled that citizens need not answer such intrusive questions and that the Census Bureau may not punish those who refuse to bare all, the attitude of the government advocate is perhaps even more significant. Essentially, the census bureaucrats believe they have the right to ask us common folk any questions they damned well please.
This hardly settles the dispute. After going to a three-judge panel, the losing side will most assuredly appeal. Eventually, the Supreme Court will have to decide how much is too much. The Constitution, after all, authorizes only that a census be undertaken every decade for the purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress (Article I, Section 2).
Unfortunately, the Constitution has not been widely observed or respected by any branch of government -- federal, state, or local -- for longer than memory serves. Whether this one small area of disagreement will signal a brief respite in our seemingly inexorable march to a more powerful and nagging nanny state remains to be seen.
In any event, the Census Bureau faces the unenviable situation of defending its quest to discover how many bathrooms you own in the midst of a revelation from its checkered past. Recent reports indicate that the kinds of precise and so-called privacy-protected racial and ethnic data the Census Bureau collects once found their way into the hands of government officials charged with yet another earlier, historical violation of human rights.
When the United States government cast aside the tenets of individualism and justice -- that people should be judged on the basis of who they are and what they personally have done -- and instead embraced the corrupt notions of collective guilt and prior restraint, those who rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II found their victims pinpointed by the helpful and conscientious workers of the Census Bureau.
Those setting up the internment (concentration?) camps were spared the necessity of working overly hard as they implemented the very kind of statist insanity our soldiers were supposedly dying to prevent in Europe and the Pacific.
Such facts as these do not mesh well with the selling job the Census Bureau has launched across the airways.
Nevertheless, it remains an open question in the struggle between personal privacy and personal greed which will prevail.
The television ads sponsored by the Census Bureau are well-produced and frightening (for a lover of freedom) in their implications. Consider some of the approaches chosen for inducing people to fill out and send in their forms.
We see a young (and single?) mother working in a small diner. Harried, she tries to handle the demands of her customers, her small-business boss, and those of her rather hyperactive toddler son. When her boss informs her that she should not be bringing her child in to work, at all, we are expected to empathize and sympathize with her plight.
And how is the plight of this minimum-wage parent to be resolved? By filling out her census form, of course!
If she performs her patriotic duty and spills her demographic guts to the bean-counters in Washington, D.C., why all manner of manna shall flow from our beneficent leaders. Free daycare for all!
Not only is the Census Bureau not averse to mixing an appeal to fear as well as greed into its propaganda, it also falsely seeks to convey the impression that we ordinary blokes -- not Congress, not the White House, not the Supreme Court, not the lobbyists who swarm the corridors of our political Mecca -- we have the ultimate power. The camera pans past the impressive stone buildings inhabited by the public "servants" whom we serve and zeroes in on a humble story-and-a-half home in a lower middle-class neighborhood. You, the narrator intones, yes, you -- who could not afford a trip to Washington, D.C., to plead your case -- you are the true power for determining where all that loot snatched by that other paragon of purity -- the IRS -- where all that ill-gotten money will be spent.
In a very general sense, of course, the ninety-five-plus percent of Americans who clamor for what the Census Bureau promises them (Just fill in that form!) are willing if unwitting accomplices of the largest robbing-Peter-to-pay-Peter-er-Paul scheme in history. Not only daycare but exercise programs for seniors, job training, education, and on and on are carrots dangled to bribe us into acquiescence with the desires of the State as it seeks to leave us no scintilla of privacy.
Of course, what the innumerable commercials spewed forth at the behest of the Census Bureau fail to mention -- let alone dwell upon -- is the humongous stick held in the hands of our public "servants" to enforce our obedience to their extortionate demands.
No, no. Government is the fount of all that is good in our lives. Without the velvet-covered fist guiding and nurturing us in our every waking (and sleeping) hour, we would drift along like helpless naifs, our lives pitiless horrors.
But answer all the questions required by the Census Bureau, and the unmitigated terror will cease! Banished by the Wizards of Washington who do one better than grow money on trees. That, after all, would take too long. No. Our ever-vigilant public "servants" simply print the green stuff in a never-ending stream of generosity and benevolence.
And all you have to do is fill out the form!
In the battle between privacy and greed, the lamentable reality is that the American public wants both. They have forgotten or chosen to ignore the old adage about paying the piper. They believe they are entitled to all those goodies. If you are entitled to something, then it is yours by right. That which is yours by right must be supplied by someone else. That someone else can expect neither gratitude nor payment from the you, the recipient, for giving you that which is your due. After all, they owe it to you.
For the better part of a century, the cult of the all-embracing State has accelerated throughout our culture. The tendrils of "caring" penetrate into every crevice of our existence. In government schools, our children are brainwashed to raise their gazes to the East whenever they are troubled. Any solution to their problems must somehow include a role for government. Self-reliance is denounced as anti-social, self-interest as immoral. The community above all else.
"It's your future."
That's the tag line the Census Bureau uses to entice us to do their bidding.
The scary aspect of this whole sorry spectacle is that this may very well be our future, a world in which personal responsibility, personal moral autonomy, and personal property are obliterated from public discourse. A future in which greed is denounced in the open and celebrated in the dark.
The lovers of freedom, however, prefer to create their own future by their own hands using their own minds.
Count on it.
