photo provided

Shown left is Julia Hamilton, Jackson Hamilton in the center and Ann Thompson with her clipboard on the right. Thompson works for the US Census and showed up at the Hamiltons' door.

The United States Government came looking for me on May 16. That won't surprise all of my readers, many of whom have been expecting something like that to happen for a long time. However I and the president are currently members of the same political party. The thought police aren't likely headed to my front porch in I'On before January 20, 2013.

The Federal Government appeared at our front door in the likeable person of Ann Thompson, our neighbor, who is working as an enumerator for the US Census. She took the job because it looked fun and interesting and because she felt it was her patriotic, civic duty.

Our original census form got lost in the mountain of junk mail which even the recession has failed to obliterate. When we didn't return our form, Ann left a note at our house offering to come by. We were delighted to invite her over Sunday afternoon to add our three names to the national list. We could have just downloaded the form and mailed it in, but the opportunity to be personally enumerated (and score a story for another newspaper column) seemed like a good thing. It was.

South Carolina has made real progress with this census. In 2000, only 60 percent of the people in South Carolina returned their forms in the first round. This time it was 80 percent. Enumerators like Ann are now whittling that 20 percent down a household at a time.

I had hoped that Ann would have one of the high tech handheld computers some enumerators are using, but she showed up with a handful of paper forms and a plastic clipboard. We sat on the porch on a pretty spring afternoon as she asked the questions.

Most questions focus on being sure everyone gets counted where they lived, once and only once, as of April 1. There are rules about where people away at college or serving in the military should be counted, but those didn't apply to anyone at our home. Ann carefully collected our full names and our birth dates, as well as how we were related. She asked if we owned our home outright or if we were renting or still paying a mortgage on it. The questions were of the plainest and most essential variety.

Most of the information collected won't be used for its particular content in our lifetimes. After it is tabulated and aggregated into categories and districts, the personal data spends 72 years locked away in a warehouse. Until then, the census just tells us where, how many and who we of the United States are in a general way.

Our descendents may use that information to find out who their ancestors were about 2090 when they think into their computers and find out that their great, great grandparents lived in a house they owned in Mount Pleasant, S.C. on Earth. It is possible that they will go to a porthole on a space station to attempt to see where that is. They may take their children out on the surface of some distant planet and point to our sun, a bright spot in a constellation invisible to us. Or they may struggle through some Earthbound wasteland envying what we allowed to turn to disaster.

This census reaches back to the founding of the Republic. It has recorded the expansion of America from 13 struggling colonies to the over 300 million Americans there are today. Though the census was the first operation of the US Government to be tabulated by computers, over half of that effort has been done by people on paper. Ann did her part in about 10 minutes Sunday. If you have questions about the local census effort, you can call (843) 323-4000.

Of the people she has spoken to, only one household has refused to be enumerated. She couldn't talk them into it. Though roads, schools, benefits of government programs are all apportioned based in the constitutionally required "actual enumeration," Ann couldn't persuade them to cooperate. Even when she reminded them that East Cooper's influence in the Congress of the United States and the Legislature is divided based on the census, they wouldn't answer. She'll kick that one upstairs to a specialist. I guess eventually, if you hang tough enough, it keeps working its way up until Barack Obama calls you from the White House and reminds you that we've got a country to run here.

We do have a country to run. The decision of politicians like Michelle Bachman to politicize the Census was another in the long line of excesses by those who believe we should fight each other for the future, instead of building it together. In countries like India today, leaders look at their huge populations as resource. We should view every American as part of a national family that though, conflicted and diverse, has and can do amazing things.

On Sunday, our family was happy to have Ann add us to the current list and growing historic record of who those Americans are.

William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village.