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Thursday, April 08, 1999 By Diana Nelson Jones
On behalf of this looming Census 2000 thing, the government is getting gooey on us, telling us we all matter, we all count. Everyone with two wits to rub together knows that's a fresh load right from the farm.
I see this as a perfect chance for me to exercise my right as an American not to be counted. And if I am counted, I'll be counted under protest. I have two concerns as reasons, one, the hypocrisy, and two, the expense: The government will be spending maybe $5 billion, $6 billion on a clumsy, 19th-century ritual that a bunch of bright sixth-graders could probably do in one-tenth the time at a hyperbolic reduction in cost.
So, from an era of families who had 2.3 children, I, the second of three, gave my younger brother my rightful status as a whole number and became a fraction, thinking I stand a better chance of being ignored if I come after a decimal.
It was a good trade, too: My brother is a breeder, and breeders count much more than non-breeders because they contribute more to our landfills and make work for lots more people.
I like the odds of being a fraction in 2000. It's really where I belong, among the minority millions who just don't hie to the hitch, as my grandfather used to say.
In this group you've got your loonies and dumbheads, who we don't need to quantify, and your militia freaks, who we do but can't. You've got your Libertarians, who don't believe in the government in the first place. Then there are the bird-flippers, eccentrics and iconoclasts. People who don't watch TV, talk about calories or have any desire to go near Orlando, Fla.
Proudly a claster o' icons, I do not question the government's need to count us or doubt the importance, for such things as public funding. But it's scary to think the census is what we rely on. It missed 10 million people the last time we were all counted. No wonder the public thinks the government keeps too much of our money. If an accurate count determines what we're due, they're right.
Let's face it, the people who really count are already counted. They're gripped to the status ladder like a thief coming up a trellis. The vast middle range, a k a the masses, count because they pay most of the taxes and maintain the general contentment the government depends on in order to get away with things. Some people the government doesn't give a damn about are counted simply because they're home when the census worker comes.
If the government would just cut the crap and do it the way we expect it to anyway, it would sneak into our computer files, tap around for five minutes, save us a few billion dollars and find out whatever it needs to know. I'll bet it knows how many apartments I've ever trashed, how many times I have called a policeman sir, my mother's maiden name, the number of LPs I have that don't skip, the food my cats prefer and yes, a real census question, how many bathrooms I have.
This method would miss illegals, but that's the point of being illegal. It would miss that handful of credit-card hold-outs, but the government doesn't care about them anyway. It would have missed the Unabomber, but I'll bet the census missed him, too.
No method accurately counts the homeless, but if the homeless counted to the government, they would have been educated or medicated long before this. The census probably counts people in prisons because they're easy to count, though it's taking more and more time: Thank goodness the government kills some of them pretty regularly, huh?
It all comes down to asking yourself this simple question: Am I better off now than I was in 1990?
If you are, you really and truly count.
Diana Nelson Jones can be e-mailed at djones@post-gazette.com.
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