George Rebane
The feds are telling us that they need to collect all that data about us in the 2010 census so that government can serve us better. Nine out of ten of us will get the ‘short form’ that already goes beyond what the Constitution prescribes for a census. One out of ten will get the ‘long form’ that includes questions about your mortgage and what time you leave for work in the morning. If you sleep with a teddy bear, you will be outed. (BTW, I couldn’t find the link for the long form, can anyone help?)
I got this link from CABPRO that features a YouTube video of Jerry Day telling us about a sinister experience he had with the Census Bureau when he submitted a set of questions for a scheduled telephone interview with them. Upon seeing the questions, the feds cancelled the interview and refused to answer a single question. I would have asked the same questions, and my guess is, so would you. Michelle Malkin, one of my very favorite on-air commentators and bloggers, also has a worthy piece or two on this census (here).
For those Americans keeping track of government overreach and concerned about their privacy, each of these data gathering projects is more comprehensive and intrusive as far as painting a very accurate and intimate picture of each of us. Instinctively, this is something a free people would reject. But like slowly boiling frogs, we have been taught not to notice the increasing encroachment into our lives. Taught? Here’s an example of an Obama student propaganda program that teaches the joy of compliance to our little darlings. As the song says, ‘They’ve got be carefully taught.’
If the Tea Party Patriots are looking for a concrete rallying point for highlighting an intrusive, wasteful government, then organizing their membership for a meaningful pushback to the ‘Census Enumerator’ who rings your doorbell would be something we all could get excited about. In the military you are taught that the Geneva Convention requires a prisoner to give only his name, rank, and serial number. We should reveal the moral equivalent of this – name, gender, and age of the occupants of the household.
To serve us better, … hmmm? I’m reminded of an old science fiction story (and movie) in which some technologically superior aliens arrived. They claimed to be galactic do-gooders whose job it was to elevate and benefit the species they encountered across the galaxy. Their prescriptions for Earth were contained in a book entitled ‘How to Serve Man’ that they displayed, but which we could not read since it was written in their language. The aliens delivered on their promise – wars were abolished, diseases disappeared, food and entertainment was available to all. A program was started to take some people back to their world on a regular basis for advanced training. The new utopia came to an end when a stowaway human made it back to Earth to reveal that ‘How to Serve Man’ was a cookbook.
rebanesruminations.com 
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