December 6, 2007

• Civic Duty, Deliberations & Google’s Gadgets

  One of the good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) things about traveling as much as I did for 15 years and not even having an address for the last 5 of those years, is that I have never been summoned for jury duty.  Until now. 

  Don’t get me wrong.  I was actually looking forward to the day I got to serve on a jury.  It’s something I’ve always been curious about.  The group dynamic and the whole deliberation process fascinates me (see below).  Since I’ve actually had a real home now for 5+ years, I was wondering if they were ever going to “find” me.  I’m a registered voter and I have a driver’s license, so I suspected it was only a matter of time (unless there was some felony in my deep dark past that I didn’t know about!) until my civic duty caught up with me.  Unfortunately, that time has now come, and it’s…..drum roll please…

  NEW YEAR’S EVE!!!???

  

  WTF??  Who starts a jury trial on New Year’s Eve?  Don’t they know about the fabulous “GLY group” of friends I’ve traveled all over the world with on New Year’s Eve for the past ten years???  Surely the must know about that?  Don’t they read my blog?  Who do they think they are??

  Having no experience whatsoever with this, I had no idea what to do.  The summons was quite clear about the consequences for not appearing:

  

  Since horizontal stripes aren’t exactly slimming, I thought I had best respond, even though I would have a good alibi in the fact that I only open mail twice a year, LOL. 

  

  The stupid summons said nothing about postponement either.  Basically what it said was that the only way you could get out of jury duty was if you were dead, or had one of these excuses:

  Medical Excuses – Complete Section E of your summons. If you are over 70, a physician’s statement is NOT required, but you must provide your age, date of birth and the reason for your medical excuse in the space provided in Section D. All requests for excuse must be signed in Section G.

  Financial Hardship – Financial Hardship requests are strictly scrutinized. The fact that your employer does not pay for jury service is not sufficient grounds for excuse. You must be able to demonstrate how service as a juror will cause you EXTREME hardship. Section C must be completed. Failure to complete Section C in its entirety will cause automatic qualification for jury service.

  Transfer – To change to another court location within the county, you must provide a legally sufficient reason in writing indicating why you are prevented from appearing at the courthouse to which you have been randomly summoned by computer. A written request, briefly explaining your hardship, must be provided in Section D. Only a true hardship is grounds for a transfer, inconvenience is not.

  I was scared to call the number to register because I thought once I was officially “in the system”, there would be no way to escape the Matrix.

  

  Enter Google, to save the day!  Once I learned that I could actually postpone my jury duty (one time only) by calling the number, I gladly called and was actually pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the automated phone system!  (There’s a first!)  Bottom line, is now I don’t have to report for jury duty until January 22nd.

  (Speaking of Google, did you see that they added a Hong Kong skyline theme to their theme menu, that changes in light and texture based on the time of day!?  I LOVE it!!  It’s almost as good as being there, or at least looking at Skunky’s photos!  They also added  the solar system, showing a new scene for each day of the week; a family of raccoons playing in a leaf pile; a tiger on Jeju Island, South Korea; and JR, the lovable monster who grapples with life in a city for which he is entirely too big.

  

  

  

  Hong Kong skyline photo courtesy of master photographer Jeff (Skunky)!!

  Google and its gadgets make my life so much easier.  If you use Firefox (and why wouldn’t you? Except for the fact that embedded material like YouTube videos don’t show up in the Xanga editor, anyone know why??) you should also check out the Google toolbar add-ons for Firefox.  I can highlight any word on any webpage and instantly search for it in Wikipedia, YouTube, the New York Times, dictionary.com, and so on.  It’s a real time saver.

  

  

  Another trick I just learned was that you could type “link:”any website url”" into google to find how many other webpages are linked to that site.  Not sure how #2 got on mine, but it’s an interesting tool nonetheless.  (Actually, I must have a Xanga entry tagged with “celebrities” just like “talky alex“) )

  

  Sorry….that was a LONG parenthetical phrase….I digress.  Back to, what was I talking about?  Oh yeah, juries.  I was recently thinking more about the whole “deliberation” process after receiving some advice I solicited from a good friend.  The advice concerned how to respond to an emailed article that originally came from some military grunt forum that stated, among other things, that:

  President Bush did not make a mistake in his handling of terrorism. He made the mistake of believing that we still had the courage and fortitude of our fathers. He believed that this was still the country that our fathers fought so dearly to preserve. It is not the same country. It is now a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah and the land of Oz. We did unite for a short while after 911, but our attitude changed when we found out that defending our country would require some sacrifices.

  Ugh!  Which way to the vomitorium??  After reading this, I wanted to send one of my sharply critical emails attacking the author’s position that people who don’t support the war (and the president) live an immoral life and that Muslims:

  [sic] believe that it is okay, even their duty, to kill anyone who will not convert to Islam. It has been estimated that about one-third or over three hundred million Muslims are sympathetic to the terrorists cause…Hitler and Tojo combined did not have nearly that many potential recruits.

  
  

  …This makes it OK for us to go to war with Iraq!!??  Lord & Taylor, where to begin??? 

  So anyway as I started writing my response, I thought twice and asked the advice of a wise friend who I consider an expert in matters of diplomacy.  I hope he doesn’t mind me paraphrasing some of what he told me:

  The person who wrote this article, buys into a version of generational difference that makes me think he is a staunch supporter of patriotism, and that his brain is wired in well-defined systems of dichotomous information-processing.  It would be difficult to engage such a thinker in a conversion mission—which is what I suspect you would like to do.  Instead, I would approach this as an ideal jury deliberation:

  Parties agree to discuss an issue, parties accept they may change their minds after hearing everyone out and deliberating collectively.  Every person agrees that one can understand another’s opinion without having to accept their positions.  Each person should lay out his/her opinion while everyone else does their best to listen carefully without passing judgment (recent research indicates only well-trained minds can do this at will).  Closure only comes when parties feel they have said all they wanted, are at peace with their deliberations, and can at least understand other parties’ reasoning for differing views about the same subject. 

  In concrete ways, I would agree with several of the points in the article that were made about people coming together and then I would present my own counter-evidence.  I would make the point that the same people did despicable things to fellow Americans during the same time exactly BECAUSE they saw the world, and America, in the dichotomous ways (us versus them) that allows for that type of unquestioned unity. For instance, Japanese American citizens were taken from their homes, put into concentration camps inside the United States, children were separated from parents, no explanations were given to parents or children, no order of the law was followed, no trials were conducted, and no amendments were made after years of such treatment.  All this while using Japanese American soldiers to fight the war in the Pacific region. 

  Very similar things happened to Native Americans.  The same generation took children away from families, by force, without explanation, to raise them in warehouses across America well into the 60s.  Women were pushed out of jobs once the war was over.  WWII GIs were given 2 years of salary with no questions asked for serving the nation in the war, then had their college education paid for 100% without restrictions of place, tuition cost, etc.  This contrasts in extreme forms with the way Iraq War vets are being treated by the current administration (you know the details here).  America did not follow a pre-emptive strike, but it was rather forced into the war by a strategy perceived by the population as cowardly (Pearl Harbor).  There are a thousand points to be made here in rather objective ways.

  Bravo!!  This kind of goes back to my “Perceptions” post about generational differences and how they affect the way we see the world.  It’s doubtful that the author of the article that sparked this will ever read this entry (maybe he’ll Google himself).  If he does, perhaps it will spark a deliberation that I will now be better prepared for.  Besides, as my wise friend also stated, I could always tell him that this email changed my life in such a profound way that I’ve decided to fly to Iraq and serve as a peace liaison because I felt the inextricable pull of patriotism!  Hmmm…maybe deliberation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Guess I’ll find out on January 22nd.  Let’s hope it’s not a murder trial!!

  • 7:41 pm
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