The Invisible Man

A young man was just outside my office today, filling out an application form to attend a youth leadership event in Nova Scotia.

Such application or registration forms often include voluntary self-classification or self-identification questions. You know:

"I identify as (select as many as apply):
_ Aboriginal/First Nations _ Immigrant _ Visible Minority
_ Multi-generational Canadian Visible Minority _ First-generation Canadian _ Acadian"

and so on and so on. The reasons for collecting this data should be pretty self-evident so I'm not going to get sidetracked by that...

...anyway, as I was saying, they ask these questions on the forms, and this young man was filling out the form to attend the thing, and he appeared to be struggling mightily with the question... finally he looked at me, with great consternation on his face, and said, plaintively,

"'Ronnie'? Am I invisible?"

ronnie