What's the Fuss?

Monday, October 5, 2009
I was reading Newsweek last night, and there was an article about how people are getting all up in arms about the 2010 census. Everyone's got their oar in the water - illegal immigrants, right wingers, left wingers, gay marriage advocates, not to mention the usual gerrymandering shenanigans that occur every ten years.

My reaction? Meh.

I've always done the census with little thought. I understand how the data is used (and misused), and I believe that the benefits of filling it out fully outweigh the ways in which the data is manipulated by those who have their own agenda. Do I have privacy concerns? You bet. Do I "trust the government" to "do the right thing?" Don't make me laugh. But census results are used for more than just identifying Congressional Districts, and I'd rather government decisions were made on some informed basis rather than pulling the answers out of their collective asses.

The opportunistic ravings of Glen Beck and Michele Bachmann aside (no, the guv'ment isn't going to use your census results to deny you your 2nd Amendment rights, you tool), I consider the Census to be a necessary evil.

9 comments:

The Mechanicky Gal said...

All of these conspiracy theorists, can't they get a nice hobby or something? Occupy their time in a more productive way?
My grandmother had no birth certificate as she was born at home, around 1903. The only way she could have proved her citizenship was through the census.
But other than that, what's the big deal?

WendyB_09 said...

The Census office was one floor below us in the downtown building I was working in.

They have the whole floor. Security is pretty tight. When the building was repairing tornado damage a couple years ago, the repair contractors had to have someone in the room with them whenever they were working, which severely limited the times they were allowed to get work completed on that floor. Oh, and then the Census Dept complained about how long it was taking!!

Eric said...

I can't believe that you're taking such an irresponsible view of this horrifying breach of everyone's privacy! Who knows what the government will do when the most intimate details of your private life are exposed to their prying eyes! I hope everybody takes notice of this tremendous intrusion into the daily lives of Americans and registers their opposition and displeasure on their:

Blogs
Facebook and MySpace pages
Twitter feeds
Picassa accounts
Internet forums
YouTube pages....

(/snark)

The Mechanicky Gal said...

Eric, may I suggest knitting or crochet?

Janiece said...

Amy, clearly I need to spend more time knitting so I'll be less stabby and shrill.

World Peace Through Knitting.

Dr. Phil (Physics) said...

The last time someone was knitting while in the middle of politics, it was the French Revolution...

What annoys me is that the decennial census is one of the FEW things the Constitution says the government MUST do. Everything else is just details.

Dr. Phil

Eric said...

But seriously: I can get with 10 yards of my home on Google Maps using publicly available information, people Tweet their bowel movements and "sext" intimate photographs and fill their Facebook pages with details of their wild weekend, and somebody thinks a fairly generic questionaire is a massive intrusion?

Orwell was fundamentally wrong: privacy wasn't killed by over-reaching tyrannical governments, it was voluntarily euthanized by its owners.

Hell, some of the anti-census people quoted in the Newsweek article are being quoted from their comments on online forums, blogs, etc. Do you know how shocked I'll be if Bill Sparkman's killers--be they anti-government paranoids or dope growers--have MySpace pages? Not one iota, is how shocked.

One of the reasons I have my name up on my own blog is that I googlestalked myself and realized that any anonymity was a paper-thin pretense. I realize there are some people (I can think of two UCFers) who have done a slightly better job shielding themselves, but that's a rarity. You'd have to be wholly "off-the-grid" to be traceless. So I'm not too worried about filling in census forms. Honestly, what's going on the forms will be some of the least-personal, most-public information that's available about me.

Janiece said...

Eric, you've pretty much described why my reaction to the "outrage" is meh. You've also described why I don't talk much about my professional life (except in the most generalized terms) here. You will never find my company name on this blog, but you'd have to be a mental deficient not to be able to figure it out, and I don't want to be unemployed for being indiscreet.

As you note - I did it to myself (and was aware of what I was doing), so I'm not going to complain about it now.

Anne C. said...

I Googled my name to check to see if my blog comes up and it didn't in the first nine pages (not sure if it ever comes up -- don't have the time to check). It's entirely possible that someone could read the entire blog and trace me through a family member of some sort, but I feel relatively shielded. (Kind of like when you have your shades drawn, but a really persistent peeping Tom (not the UCF Tom!) could figure out a way to see in anyway.)