My Redacted Life: Chapter Eleven

As luck would have it, the 4^th of July came on a Sunday in 1971, before the days of elongated holidays. They let us off Monday anyway. I went fishing with the family and returned for work promptly on Tuesday amidst many complaints of too much sun, too much food, and other overindulgences. An extra day can mean the difference between delight and misery. Numbers count.

I tried to keep up with the news, but much of life in America went unreported. For example, over in our neighboring state of Tennessee, a 17-year-old girl from Nashville named Oprah Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant. If the news made our statewide paper, I missed it. The victory gave the young lady a scholarship to an all-black college in her state where she would major in communication. I doubt if any of us would have thought much about that.

News about race was settling down, anyway. Many Americans thought “that civil-rights stuff” had all been settled in the 1960s. Weren’t the Blacks happy? They could now eat wherever they chose to.

Most of the news centered on our lightening-swift plan to bring victory in Vietnam. Second Lieutenant William L. Calley became the sole conviction resulting from the My Lai Massacre, the cold-blooded murder of several hundred Vietnamese civilians by units of the United States Americal Division. Commanding officers who ordered the massacre skated through, as commanding officers tend to do, and the affair became distant history. We all had better things to worry about.

July would be a sad month for music fans. American singer, songwriter, poet, writer and filmmaker, Jim Morrison died on July 3 from “too much love of living,” as Swinburn put it.  Less noted by the young was the passing of legend Louis Armstrong on July 6. “Pops” would dazzle us never again.

We took in the news and suffered through the Arkansas summer. I’m not saying it is miserable, but some theologians admit that the average outside temperature in our state ranges a degree or two above that of Heaven’s opposite home.

I was thankful for having an apartment with an air conditioner, albeit one without a pool. At work, I was beginning to become intimately acquainted with census material. Contained in several books, the tables provided detailed socio-economic data down to the block level. As with any data, they could be used for good or for the not so good.

The data were extremely useful for documenting need for specific areas of a city, or neighborhood, so that limited resources could be directed efficiently. They helped, as well, for justifying requests for funding.

They were also good for drawing voting district boundaries designed to maintain a white supremacy.

I was beginning to realize the power that numbers carry, or seem to carry. After all, speaking of the Vietnam travesty, our sole military strategy for most of the war had been to document more enemy deaths in battle that those of Americans. South Vietnamese or civilian deaths didn’t matter one way or the other. Numbers, selective numbers, ruled. I thought about this as I worked in a nice, cool, safe place while others still stood in harm’s way. Would it ever end?

As for my current work in planning, one thing always puzzled me until I began to understand the world a bit better. Grant applications seemed never to ask for data from tables directly available in the census data. Their use always required interpolation, bundling, estimation, guesswork, or outright prevarication.

It would all become clear to me as time went by. As with the military, selective counts rule over actual counts. A little statistical legerdemain can prove useful, until the day when actual counts refuse to belie the truth further and things erupt.