Some memories are like tiny splinters in your thumb. A dull pain, throbbing now and again, tells your brain to examine the sensation, and try to squeeze it out from under your skin. Other memories tickle your lower back, and suddenly, your laughter rends the sour silence in a crowded space. Others still simply glow in the branches of the past you can see, hung like candles in the trees. These memories illuminate the forest, but as singular units, don't really call for actions or feelings.
Recently, I remembered flipping through my Florida History book--the history I learned at the age of 9, long before the FCAT.
There were a number of pages that had sky-blue rectangles highlighting a matrix of numbers, subtitled by categories of information. That was the first time I ever learned of a census. My young powers of deduction told me that Censuses took place every ten years, I loved perusing the blue rectangles, watching the population of Florida rise and fall through history, as others searched for gold, and youth, and immortality.
I also remembered being in Pre-Calculus studying logarithms, the last bit of fun before the hell of limits. Of course there was plenty of discussing the practicality of these useful formulas, namely, a sense of the world which surrounds (ah, Nature). When you consider the fact that there's some ridiculously complicated formula to figuring the distance between stars we've actually discovered, it is impressive to consider the remarkably simple application in figuring world population. I wonder if there isn't a star for every soul on this planet, seeing as how we're somewhere halfway between six and seven billion now.
As I aged out of my teens, I remember learning about politics, which are ever evolving. I remember sitting in one of the more demanding English classes, and in a discussion over Jewish Literature, my professor saying it seems ridiculous to reduce politics to conservative and liberal discourses, "Am I conservative, you ask? I say about what?"
I remember learning that seeing as how the government is run by a bunch of human beings, it can turn into giant mistake machine and really stomp a mud-hole in the middle of my life-crises (to which I have the right as an American). I learned in an abstract way that the government does many things that I happen to dislike, on that I'm sure we have some common ground.
These memories all flickered into my present mind while I sat in the bask of neon at Los Hermanos and hearing a person at my table claim ignorance of what a U.S. Census actually is, and then question its importance.
While the United States Constitution is full of bullshit like-- oh I don't know, the right to for you to vote for the wrong guy, and the right for you to open your yap, the right for me to take my handgun and shoot you in the face when you piss me off, and the right for me to shutthefuckup when the fuzz bully club my ass for murder--it also has very simple straightforward guidelines like the number of senators from each state, the whole "born in this country" thing, AND A FRINKING POPULATION COUNT EVERY TEN YEARS.
Why do citizens feel the need to snub this simple survey? The internet already knows everything about you anyways.
