The other day I was getting ready to lift weights when I overheard someone in the locker room complain about having to report for jury duty. This is an attitude shared by the vast majority of Americans, the same ones who insist that voting in elections is a civic duty even though a jury vote is far more meaningful.
Let's review. Voting for a pre-selected slate of sycophants, mediocrities, and liars to assume control of the bloated political apparatus will do nothing to improve your life or anyone else's, even if by some miracle your vote tips the scales in favor of Tweedledum over Tweedledee. By contrast, your vote on a jury can easily tip the scales; it will make an immediate difference in people's lives; and it can foil the government's machinations. On this last score, you as a juror have the right to "nullify" a law you disagree with, a glorious power dating back to the colonial era and that not even the president possesses (at least theoretically). It makes no difference that the facts show a clear legal violation; if you as a citizen find the law unjust, it is your right and duty to refuse to enforce it. This power frightens the establishment, so much so that it actively lies to jurors by telling them that they must enforce the law when triggered by the facts. Consider that a military tribunal tried and convicted the plotters behind the Lincoln assassination, and for the specific reason that the establishment feared jury nullification should the matter be tried in a civilian court.
Unfortunately, today the establishment doesn't have to work very hard to keep jurors in line. The ignorance, apathy, and sloth of most Americans today take care of all that. What supreme irony that they attack someone like me for not participating in the electoral Kabuki theater, when I am the one eager to cast a vote that truly counts.
I could not agree more. People are astonished when I say I would be on a jury gladly, but never vote. While both pursuits are negligible in total effect, if I can have some hand in preventing a single injustice or even just bringing some common sense to a room full of jurors, it will be worth far more than a lifetime of "votes".
ReplyDeleteIn many ways this one observance summarizes the modern American mentality well.
"Heaven forbid I have to make and effort and spend time in something noble to perhaps make a difference or save a life. No! Look at me I voted!! It says so on the bumper sticker. Candidate 2 that is beholden to the same political correctness and societal momentum they all are was clearly better than candidate 1 and much more like my own skin color..."
Geez. Democracy. But I've been over that before.
Jury duty vs. voting is like giving five hundred bucks to a local Catholic School or donating fifty a pop to some Red Cross initiative in "foreign disaster area of the month". You might feel both are equally worthy or equally useless, but the former will most certainly have more actual effect. Why we need abstract "feel goods" that won't amount to anything real in distant places we will never see amazes me. So it goes with voting...
Thanks again for you efforts. Even though I don't post often, I do read all of them and I suspect others do too.
Well said. A person trumpeting the fact that he voted is like the Pharisee who blew a trumpet to announce his act of charity -- both are narcissistic displays rather than true accomplishments, the greatest of which often go unwitnessed and unremarked. But we live in a lazy, shallow era when flash beats substance every time.
ReplyDeleteI do wish the lurkers here were less reticent; however, I know that many of them aren't fans of mine and can't articulate why they think I'm wrong. I simply make them angry, and they don't want to analyze why. The fact that I'm connecting with independent thinkers (like you) and angering mindless sheep is very rewarding.