O.K. I'm not a morning person and conscious thought at 5:30 AM while driving to work isn't at all likely. Friday morning was no exception, so I hardly took notice of the 2010 Census PSA on the radio. However by 11:00 AM I was wide awake, fully engaged and ready for Rush Limbaugh. There it was again, that same PSA. This was no early morning hallucination, this was real and this was NUTS!

The Census PSA explained that in a town of a couple hundred people there were two traffic lights and that if the people didn't complete the census and the population grew by a few hundred more people there would still only be two traffic lights and then there would be gridlock due to the lack of traffic lights.

Gee it isn't like I was too keen on participating in the census to start with, but now I'm even less motivated. In the rural area where I live it seems as if we already have way too many traffic lights...hey I was stuck at a red light when I first heard this ad. What are they trying to say? If we all complete the census will we be rewarded with even more government regulation? Is this some sort of subliminal message? Comply! Submit! Embrace more governmental intervention in your life!

Call me crazy, but shouldn't the PSA make you feel more inclined to participate? Isn't this essentially a sales pitch? Can the advertising gurus and the census bureau really be so detached that they think we want more government regulation? Maybe if these folks were stop drinking Kool Aide and switch to Tea they might get a clue.

Of course if we don't take our responsibility to the government seriously we will be punished with gridlock. As someone who lives in rural America (50 miles from Obamagrad) I think of gridlock in political terms as obstructionist bickering in congress which is preventing the implementation of President Obama's radical socialist agenda. Come to think of it gridlock sounds pretty good to me!

Truth be told, I'm not exactly a country bumpkin. I attended college in Chicago and it was there that I experienced traffic gridlock. Yes, gridlock is really awful and it is frustrating beyond human endurance. In the future former president's adopted home town gridlock occurs when vehicles fail to clear an intersection before the traffic light turns red, which then prevents the other vehicles from moving through the intersection and so on until traffic grinds to a halt. The major cause of gridlock...too many traffic lights!


Phil Boehmke