I couldn’t wait to get into the Jury Commission office this morning.
It’s not for the $19 a day, it’s not for the quite horrible free
“coffee,” and it’s not for digital cable. I’m anxious to hear my name
called.
This sort of investment is crazy hard to develop. The first thing we
look for from an employer is what we need to pay bills, and there’s a
bit more potential for pride in serving your fellow citizens as fair
arbiters of their constitutional rights than there is in, say, selling
denim purses. But the Jury Commission manages to create this sense of
investment despite the relative discomfort because we all know we’re a
part of something.
This is the core of “service”: whatever the product itself, you can be a
part of something, of an interaction, of the effort to meet someone’s
needs and add a little happy to their day. You can do this pimpin’
pleather accessories, you can do this fixing carburetors, and you can do
this running for president. It’s more than a Twitter account and a
glossy web page, but right now, those work for some things. For
others, you could do worse than to smile.
Posted by email from erectlocution’s posterous
In Uncategorized on
21 August 2008 with no comments
I’m on jury duty. I’ve been waiting for years for this opportunity. Honestly. I know it’s not 12 Angry Men or Law & Order: Melodrama Unit; that’s not what I want. What do I want? I’ll tell you.
I want to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with people I don’t know, who’ve been assembled with no particular attention to any attributes they do or don’t have. I want to open a dialog with these people, about evidence, about logic, and about what’s right and wrong. I want to learn from them things I don’t currently know, or better, learn to appreciate things I don’t properly appreciate now. I want to teach them things, too. This is the only way to achieve justice, but only as a side-effect; rather, this is the only way to maintain a society, and justice emerges therefrom.
I don’t confuse “the law” with “justice,” mind you, but I’m not rhetorically dismissive of the fact that “justice” is what “the law” aspires to defend. Just as in the mathematics of limits, the law may never achieve justice, but approaches ever closer to it.
It’s imperfect, and I’m almost certainly waiting to be called to a jury at least partially comprised of racists, misogynists, and generally closed-minded miscreants. Those are my countrypersons. We shop for groceries together. That’s who honks impatiently at me at a green light. That’s who teaches my children, who installs my cable, who runs city government, and who runs the businesses that provide jobs. This is our species.
And, besides, how interesting would the Samuel L. Jackson and Michelle Pfeiffer movies have been if, instead of the mean and disenchanted, they’d attempted to teach the perfectly behaved and extremely bright?
In Aldous, Uncategorized on
19 August 2008 with no comments
We set out last night at about 7, stomachs full and four-and-a-half hours of driving stretching out before us. I’d printed only the most general of directions, amounting to “Get on the highway and go this direction.” They were slightly more specific, but only just.
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
We hit the exit from interstate to state highway at about midnight, and within minutes needed to stop for directions. What followed missing a single sign directing us west was a circuitous easterly meandering through the streets of Smalltown, OH, as if we were hunting prey. As if we were hunting very clever prey.
We laughed at my claims of mystic directional intuition after finding they’d led us in a 10-mile-circumference circle. We laughed at the Walking Guy who very likely, after our sixth pass, expected us to hop out and bag him for rendition. We laughed at the Cirque de Soleil-like contortions sleeping little boys can form without waking.
We laughed, and that’s why I hope we never plan our trips too much.
In Family, Foolishness on
14 August 2008 with no comments