The Man

A few months ago we got our census packet like everyone else.  At the time I didn’t really have any problem filling out the whole dang thing.  Sure, I’ll fork over lots of information for you.  Who needs privacy anyway.

All of my conservative, Christian friends with lots of kids though seemed up in arms about this invasion of privacy.  Someone told us that legally we only needed to answer question 1 and tell them how many people lived in our house.

The more I thought about it, the more I agreed.  I filled out the census but only giving ages and sex for my kids.  I normally label myself Caucasian or other because I don’t really align myself by my heritage.  I figure we’re all American’s who cares about if I identify with my people or not. There isn’t ever a bubble for American though.

With all of the census hype the Mexican groups were out in full force trying to convince everyone to fill out the census.    I read an article how Mexicans are consistently under represented in the census because they worry about immigration.  It might not seem like a big deal,  but many families count on all of the services that are formed by population profiling.  So I bubbled in Latino for all of our races.   I threw my people 6 extra spots.

I sent away the form feeling rather rebellious.

Fast forward to last week.  I got a call from the US Census bureau telling me that I turned in an incomplete form.  The worker wanted to know if it would be a convenient time to finish filling out the form.  I told her no.  I argued quite awhile with her about my civil liberties and she should just back off of my kids private information.

For any of you that know me personally, I am the most unpolitical person that exists.  I hate confrontation.  I’m a rule follower.  This was terribly out of character for me.  Somewhere in this whole counting every person process, I decided that my kids names and birthdays were the hills I were going to die on.

I told her I’d research it and might call her back.

Dave researched it.  Turns out that you do have to give them every piece of private information.  There was some crap about not wanting to count people twice.  I guess my word isn’t good enough, The Man needs birthdays and middle initials to make sure we don’t overestimate. Plus for some reason they want to know if we own our home and what we do for a job.  I’m not sure how any of that is applicable.

They called again.  Dejectedly, I readied myself to hand over birthdays and names. Yep, I sold my kids out like a canary.  So much for privacy. Turns out that the phone interview is much longer than the paper form.

In exchange for some personal information I was entertained.

In order to be absolutely sure that we don’t over count she had to ask the same questions for each person.

She wanted to know if any of us spent any time in jail (including Jacob).  I wanted to tell her that yes, my three-year-old has spent time in the clink.  But they don’t have much of a sense of humor.

“Half way house?”  Well, actually my 10-year-old has a terrible meth problem.

“Did someone stay with us that doesn’t have a home to go to?”  Does my cat count? We adopted him this year.

“Where any of us staying at our vacation home?”  I just laughed.

and it went on and on.

But we’re all counted now, each one of us.