More Good News

There are many calling this the most polarized this Republic has been since The War For Southern Independence.

That is what all you government educated sheep call The Civil War.

With that in mind remember these little feel good facts:

During the Civil War, the bureau provided maps annotated with 1860 census data to Union Gen. William T. Sherman, who used them to launch a war not on the Confederacy's army but on its civilian population. The most infamous product of the Census Bureau's assistance was Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea, a 300-mile swath of looting and destruction that would properly have been labeled a war crime if the Japanese or German armies had done it in World War II.

Not that Sherman lost his table manners: Afterward, he sent a polite note thanking the Census Bureau for its maps and research. ``Without them, I would not have undertaken what was done.'

Not that we are anywhere at all near that event. But, even short of all out war on Americans:

Most notoriously, the Census Bureau was at the heart of the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) during World War II -- and not at all reluctantly. Within five days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bureau had issued three reports using 1940 census data to pinpoint the Japanese-American population by state, city and county.

Eventually, the bureau's statisticians got directly involved. When a new roundup was planned, Census Bureau employees met with Justice Department agents. They ``would lay out on a table various city blocks where the Japanese lived and they would tell me how many were living in each block,'' recalled Tom Clark, then running the Justice Department's alien-control office and later a Supreme Court justice. After that, it was easy for the U.S. Army to conduct house-to-house sweeps.

And if they missed a few, a Census Bureau official said in a 1942 report recently uncovered by historians, ``I would give them further means of checking individuals.'' That is, names.

So fill out all of the form. Answer all of the questions. There is no reason to be worried about your information ever being used against you.