Thoughts on Jury Duty, Part 2 (this is the part where I actually write about jury duty....)

My little stint on jury duty was rather interesting. While some people try to get out of jury duty, I actually was hoping to be picked, because I was curious to see what it was like. In the end, after hours of sitting through “voir dire”, listening to the lawyers ask the potential jurors the same questions over and over, I ended up being picked as the alternate juror. That meant that I would listen to everything, but wouldn’t participate in the deliberations, unless someone got sick or was otherwise indisposed (which they didn’t).

It was interesting to see the way the legal process works. Not surprisingly, being a sort of bureaucracy, it was quite slow. We never started on time at the beginning of the day, after a break, or after lunch. “Publishing” any evidence to the jury meant a long wait while we slowly passed the items around. And about every 10 minutes (ok, maybe not quite that often), we had to wait while the lawyers and the judge conferred about some objection. The thing that surprised me most to find out was that jurors can ask the witnesses questions. After the cross examinations finished, we were asked if we had any additional questions. If anyone did, they were given a piece of paper to write it on and sign. Then the judge and lawyers reviewed it. If the question or possible answer was deemed objectionable, it was not asked, but otherwise the judge then asked our question, and the witness answered.

Deliberations were predictably slow. The first half was interesting – seeing how people related, interacted. (If you haven’t seen Twelve Angry Men, you should sometime. You can borrow it from me!) After about an hour and a half, though (it took 3 hours in total), I started to go a little crazy as the same arguments kept happening over and over, especially from people who seemed, in my opinion, to not be interpreting the law correctly. In my head ran the following lines from The Shawshenk Redemption:

“Why are you being so obtuse?”

”What did you call me?”

”Obtuse. Is it deliberate?”

Of course, being the alternate, I was unable/not allowed to say anything at all. So I ended up eating too many donuts left over from breakfast and drinking two cans of Coke to distract myself.

In the end, the jury found the defendant guilty of drug possession. It was interesting that the moment that hit home to me was when the verdict was read. The defendant didn’t make a big scene or yell or cry like on TV. He just slowly lowered his head.

Implications?
1. I certainly don’t think cocaine dealers should get a free pass, but it was sad to see how he was most likely trapped in a cycle of bad choices – who knows if he will ever get out? Sometimes I wonder if I have a good life because I’m wise and make good choices, or because I’m fortunate enough that making good and healthy choices is easy for me.
2. Most likely, this guy was replaced long ago and there are other desperate people helping to continue the cycle of addiction. Do our “correctional facilities” really help anyone correct unhealthy lifecycles or do they just make people come out worse? I’m thinking the latter. If we really care about helping people change so they don’t become repeat offenders how do we do that?

Thoughts on Jury Duty – Age

My next few posts, including this one will include several things that I ended up thinking about while spending two days on jury duty this week. This entry really has quite little to do with serving on said jury, but I thought of it while I was there....so...ha!

This Monday, I ended up at the courthouse in Goshen with about 50 other people called as prospective jurors. It was interesting to be among a group of people I didn’t know, but who represented (probably) a cross-section of the population (read: voting population, probably stacked toward middle class) of Elkhart County.

I noticed in this gathering of people a feeling that I’ve been noticing with increasing frequency: a confusion about where my age group fits in. I feel this at church, at work, basically when I go anywhere that there are large groups of people of many ages.

I don’t feel like I fit anywhere. Having worked in the “adult” world for almost two years now, I’m definitely used to being in that culture. I’m used to working with people older than me, many, in fact, old enough to be my parents, as equals. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I am much younger than much of the world around me, and I feel it acutely at times: when people are discussing their kids or retirement, or when I’m in a group of people that don’t know me and assume I’m a young student. I tend to be the youngest, or nearly the youngest, in mixed groups. At jury selection, there was one person, who was an IUSB student, who I presumed to be younger than me. Most likely, everyone else was older. Even the people I assumed to be close in age to me, I often found through casual conversation were ten or more years older than me.

So I often feel conspicuously young, especially when some “kindly” older people make a habit of pointing it out. But I don’t fit in with the crowd that strangers assume I’m in, namely college students. I am part of the working world now and the world of college and studying and parties seems pretty far away to me. In fact, about a month ago, at a communal potluck put on by some friends of ours, we realized just how different we had all become. Here we were, sitting around and talking (mostly married couples) and someone noticed and pointed out that all we’d been discussing for the last half hour or so was house buying, mortgages, debt, and taxes. Not quite usual college fare.

So what do I do? I’m not quite sure. I guess right now my focus is getting the life and work experience that will benefit me and working with older and more experienced people to learn as much as I can. (I love working with Mr. Wilson, a retired teacher and principal who teaches one ENL class with me – he’s got loads of experience!) Generally, I find that most people I interact with are smart and kind enough to remember being young and are not condescending to me, which I definitely appreciate. On the one hand, I almost wish I could get older quickly, so I won’t feel this weirdness, but really, that doesn’t seem reasonable. For all I know, there will always be some outside feelings. Maybe when I get older, I’ll feel old around all the young people I see. And it doesn’t seem like a good idea to rush life. I have to live my best where I am. If I keep rushing, all I’m doing is saying that I hope I’m dead sooner!

TESTING!

I'm in the middle (actually, nearing the end - hallelujah!) of a week of testing all the Limited English Profiecient (LEP) students in the school. It's sort of interesting to do something different with my time for a while, but standardized testing is also mindnumbing to me after a while. Too much reading the same directions over and over. I'll spare you my testing rant. For now, anyway.

Silent Spring

I recently read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. It seemed the thing to do because it’s famous, I’d never read it before, and it was sitting on our bookshelf. Carson describes many examples of sprayings of deadly chemicals that killed or sickened many people, animals, and plants other than the ones it was intended to destroy. Knowing that this book is decades old, I breathed a sigh of relief to myself, thankful we don’t use DDT anymore.

However, I realized later that something worse had happened in the decades between when Silent Spring was written and when I was born. Somehow, we all, or at least my generation, had become immune to the worries about chemicals in our environment. Many times, while heating up leftovers in the microwave using a plastic container, I think to myself, “I shouldn’t do that since plastic in the microwave can create carcinogens.” But 90% of the time I go ahead and do it anyway. Why?

I justify it because I’m already surrounded by carcinogens I can’t control. I live in the second most polluted county in Indiana and breathe the factory air all day; in fact, I was probably exposed to some of those chemicals already in my mother’s womb. I try to buy organic food when I can find it and afford it, but much of the food I eat is covered in chemicals that I may or may not be able to wash off. My water may not always be safe. (Since living in our current apartment, there have been two boil orders, both of which we didn’t know about until after they were over.) People have smoked around me, sending hundreds of chemicals my way. (Smoking sections in restaurants are a joke, unless there’s a wall to stop the air.) And, like in my example, I’ve been using plastics, perhaps in inappropriate ways for years. These are just the things I’m aware and come to mind. Our society is full of chemicals, many of them dangerous over time.

So as I’m getting ready to microwave my spaghetti, I think, “Who cares? I already have all kinds of carcinogens building up in my body, which will probably give me cancer at some point. What’s one more microwaved meal?” I assume that I have no control over my environment or the substances that enter my body, and to a large extent, I don’t. When did it become ok to allow oneself to be slowly poisoned to death?

Pastel colors and the theft of Easter

As I was walking through Kroger the other day with a friend, I noticed the Easter display up. Surprise; it was weeks early! For some reason, this display bothered me, and I commented to Jamie that for some reason secularized Easter bothered me a lot more than secularized Christmas, even though Christmas is a much bigger deal, at least in this country. At first I theorized that it was perhaps the disgustingly pastel colors that I couldn't handle, not having grown out of my 12-year-old "mustn't look girly" phase. On second thought, though, it seemed to be deeper than that, so here is my analysis of my reasoning:

As I understand it, in the Russian Orthodox tradition, Easter is the pivotal holiday of the Christian year, not Christmas, as it is in this culture. When I first read that, it struck a chord with me as being "right". Doesn't it seem appropriate to be most joyous celebrating Jesus' resurrction - victory over all, even death? Easter should be a profoundly important time for Christians, but it doesn't seem to be that way. Sure, we have our Palm Sunday and various passion week services (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday), then a nice Easter service...and then what? We go color hard-boiled eggs that no one wants to eat and hide them around the yard so that the one we miss will rot and smell bad. What does that have to do with Jesus?

When it all boils down, secular Christmas at least pretends to have some value to it. Things like "sharing" and "giving" and "spending time with family" are lauded, even if the companies really only want you to buy more stuff. With secular Easter, you don't even get pretend values. You get pastel colors, lots of candy, eggs, and a rabbit. It doesn't even really make sense. Secular Christmas has a long history, dating back to the time when people celebrated the winter solstice. Secular Easter, well, as far as I know, it's only an excuse to celebrate consumerism and bad dental hygiene.

Borrowing a point from my husband, I think Halloween (we're leaving out the minority of people who use Halloween to celebrate the occult/satanism here) even beats out secular Easter in my book. While both are blatent purveyors of gluttony and tooth decay, at least Halloween isn't distracting from an important religious holiday. Kids at least can be creative in choosing and even making their own costumes and using their imaginations!

While I don't mind the once a year chance to get my Cadburry egg to eat, I think I'd be ready for consumer America to focus on a different time of year and let me think about the original meaning of Easter for once.