For the past couple of months, I have been working as a Census Field Supervisor, supporting a team of enumerators who are doing the heavy lifting of door-to-door census-taking for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The census, of course, is explicitly required by the United States Constitution, so it is obviously an important project. Every employee took an oath to support the constitution and to protect the confidentiality of any information collected.
While none of the enumerators I support have been assaulted, pretty much all of them have been insulted, harassed, yelled at, ignored, and treated with undeserved discourtesy by their fellow Americans.
And really, not just by their fellow Americans, but by their actual neighbors. During this phase of the census – called the non-response follow-up operation – enumerators are assigned to visit residences in their own neighborhoods. This increases the comfort level for enumerators, and, theoretically, encourages residents to cooperate. That’s important, because the folks the enumerators are visiting now are people who have already declined to respond by mail, telephone, or online.
While many residents are courteous and some are helpful, a distressing percentage are not. While some people are just rude, and others are justifiably frustrated because they already provided the information – or they believe they did – a fraction overreact wildly, becoming highly agitated at the mere presence of a census enumerator at their door.
It might take ten minutes to answer all the questions on the survey – two minutes if you simply provide the minimum information the Census Bureau needs. But that’s apparently too much to ask of some Americans. Instead, they are happy to harangue an enumerator for ten minutes about the evils of government or they feel compelled to yell, make a scene, and slam the door in their neighbors’ face.
For enumerators it can seem like a masters class in bad behavior.
Well, this is America, and if people don’t want to provide basic demographic information to the Census Bureau to help the nation, no one is going to force them. But, if you don’t want to answer, can’t you at least be civil about it? Do you think your neighbor standing out there, sweating under their mask, is responsible for the things that have gone wrong in your life? Do you think they personally added the census requirement to the constitution to irritate you? Does being discourteous to them put a few extra bucks in your pay envelope this week?
I have no idea if Americans are more discourteous and disturbed now than they were years ago, so you won’t hear me blustering about the decline of America. But regardless of how things were in the past, we can do better now. Its past time we started.
September 17, 2020