It Makes Me Sad

The method in which the people in charge of my dorm distribute information tends to be through the tried and true method of putting up pieces of paper with the information on it every few feet in every hallway of the building. I usually only glance at them once to see if anything on it applies to me, and then ignore them until they are torn down and replaced by another set.

I came back from a race in Austin this weekend, and find a fresh new set of papers covering every available surface in the building. These have to do with the U.S. census. The message on them is simply a picture of Uncle Sam, with the caption "Attend the MANDATORY 8:00 PM Census meeting in the lobby! Or the US Government may fine you!"

*Sigh*
The Uncle Sam poster, that of the image they're using for their announcement, was used in World War 2 as a recruitment poster; the famous "I Want YOU! For U.S. Army!" It was meant to bring in volunteers, people who were choosing to fight in the army against the Axis. Yeah, the draft went and would grab most of the other people who didn't volunteer, but the purpose of the poster itself was to bring in people who were, under their own decision, choosing to join a very dangerous organization for some larger purpose.
To me, it really says a lot about our current mentality (or at least the mentality of college students) that an icon whose purpose was to inspire choice is now being used for the purpose of forcing compliance. "Do this or else!" is a far cry from "Do this because we believe it to be the right thing to do!" I would think that they would try and convince us by pointing out the benefits that the census brings, or the necessity for a large government to have a semi-accurate count of its population, but no. We fall back onto threats.

Surprisingly enough, I'm not holding the U.S. government to blame for this; they're not the ones who made those posters. It's both the belief that threats are what's needed to convince the people living in this dorm to fill out their census, along with the fact that, given how shortsightedly ignorant most of this building's inhabitants are to the potential benefits that come from an accurate census count, that disappoints me. Thankfully, I already held such a low opinion of humanity by this point, that my opinion can't drop any further just because of some little thing like this. Yay, cynicism!