A rambling rant about reaching con-census

Today on my way to the Red Cup, I saw a federal census taker walking up my street. I shook her hand and thanked her for her service to our country. I'm as much of an anarchist as the next person, but in the face of all the tea-party protests, I find myself getting downright sentimental about the federal government. At least in theory, the federal government belongs to all of us, male and female, black and white, rich, poor, capitalist and worker. At least in theory, the government could be wrested away from the control of big business and forced to serve the interests of ordinary people. At least in theory, we could make our government take its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Okinawa and Kazakhstan and set it to fixing roads and repairing schools and creating an environmentally sustainable economic base. The tea party folks, in theory they are in favor of freedom, too, but their waving of guns and their hurling of threats and insults at people who disagree with them, well, it sure looks like their real goal is to keep the same rich white guys in charge. So I shook the hand of the census taker, and smiled at her, and engaged her in a brief conversation as a way of taking one small stand in favor of peace and civility.

Besides which, I thought the census taker might be headed up to my place to ask me some questions, and I knew I'd be absent when she got there. So I thought I'd save her the trouble of having to come back again. You see, I filled in my census form and mailed it back, but I didn't fill it out the way the nice folks at the Commerce Department hoped that I would. I just couldn't wrap my head around some of the questions.

First off, why on Earth did they have to ask whether I was male or female. As I explained to the census taker, I'm old school, I came up with the women's liberation movement, and I can't stand it after all these years that the first question we still ask about anyone is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

I was also going to explain that I'd done my best to get around the race question, too. The tea partiers are getting awfully riled up about the fact of our having an African American president. The tea partiers are even more riled up about the fact that large numbers of Latino people are making the United States their home. One big reason for this is that the tea partiers are all too aware that someday soon, people of  European extraction -- "white" people -- will no longer make up a majority of the US population. Maybe keeping track of racial demographics is just inflaming the situation? "Whiteness" is such an artificial and arbitrary thing. The world would be better off without it. As a person who happens to be of northern European extraction, white privilege is part of my life, and I need to acknowledge that and take responsibility for it. But when it came to the census, being an undefined beige person just seemed more responsible. When it came to the race question, I checked the box marked "other," and filled in "human." It's an idea I got by listening to the radio.

But I didn't get that far, because the census taker had her own remarks about the questions we are expected to answer. If you have children, you are supposed to say whether they are biological or adopted children. The census taker didn't like this. She told, "According to the law, they're both the same, and in your heart, they're both the same, but according to the census, you're supposed to say which is which." She happened to have adopted some children, and she didn't like this approach. "I have to ask some stupid questions," she said with a smile, but it's my job." She and I agreed that sometimes all of us is required to do stupid things because it's our job.

Then she checked her list, and said that I was not on her list of houses to visit. Apparently, the fact that I had filled out the form, however imperfectly, is all the Census Bureau cared about. So I bid the census taker a fond adieu and continued on my way to breakfast.