In Idiots We Trust
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?
No Comments Yet