i got all pinko liberal pissed off today.

okay, i didn’t really get completely pissed off. stunned is probably a more apt description at the time. pissed came later.

i had jury duty today. i live in a fairly ‘liberal’ north nj town. smack in the middle of blue state country, dontcha know. i figured, okay, there should be a fair amount of like-minded folk about. boy was i wrong.

i got a real wake up call into exactly how far to the left i’ve moved over the years. the first sign i was in trouble was upon arriving at the jury room. the tv was blaring ‘the view’ while the masses sat there enthralled. eww.

i quickly found a corner near the window to hole up in, donned my headphones and let some instrumental indie rock fill my ears while i tried to focus on Terry Jones’ ‘Medieval Lives’.

after a while, i realized that most folk had brought, at maximum, one book or newspaper. some had not brought anything at all and were completely dependent on the glass teat for their entertainment for the day.

hours and hours later when we were finally called into the jury room, i nearly lost my mind. the zombies, otherwise known as my fellow jurors, were lulled into the appropriate catatonic state required for sitting still, doing nothing, for an hour and fourty-five minutes. i was going crazy a half hour in because i was cut off completely from any and all of my creative endeavors except what i could conjure in my brain. and let’s just say the environment was not exactly what you would call conducive to such pursuits.

after all the people with personal difficulites got excused the first batch of jurors got into the jury stand. oh joy. now the probing began while the rest of us sat there twiddling our thumbs, though paying some attention for we would be asked to answer the same questions.

some time later, a jury the judge liked was in place. he then proceeded to ask some questions, i’m assuming to gauge people’s personalities:

marital status
career
spouse’s career
children’s careers if they work
favorite television show
preferred news media outlet, both visual and print
and…

any bumperstickers on your car.

as an experiment i answered these questions in my head:
single
graphic designer
n/a
n/a
i do not watch television. it will rot your brain.
npr/bbc/guardian uk
go vegetarian

right. not so crazy, i thought. i’ve got npr on there and plenty of people don’t watch television, right? uh. huh.

now keep in mind this is a random sampling of our ‘peers’. right.

most were married/divorced/widowed and able to answer the third question.
most had ’straight’ jobs, like in insurance or at the telephone company or somesuch.
most had kids

okay here is were the shock-o-meter started kicking in.

most, and we’re talking 13 out of 14 jurors, said they liked sitcoms best. mr. left over juror just watched the news. two people added csi. okay, now i’m feeling a tad ill and bracing myself.

news media. most listed the local papers (note that this little bug does not read the paper). a frightening number depended on local stations or cnn for their news.

and quite a scary number listed fox news as their favorite media outlet.

fox. news. omg.

and the bumpersticker thing was just silly and no one answered.

i have never felt more of a radical in my entire life, and i didn’t even say anything. throw in the fact that i don’t believe in the prison system and i have nothing in common with these people other than the fact that we all happen to have chosen to live in the same county.

i’m stunned and angry and really quite thrown.

of my closest friends, i’m probably the quietest when it comes to these things. i don’t really consider myself that radical. i can fit in at work for the most part and do my grocery shopping elbow to elbow with the common man.

the thing is i’ve found i don’t really like the common man.

this whole experience has just given me a new set of goggles with which to look at the rest of the world.

and don’t even get me started on how the case the jury will be trying is fucking three years old. the person sitting on trial is probably a quite different person than they were in 2003. how can you possibly try someone based on all of that? how can witnesses be depended upon to give accurate testimony with such a lag time, especially the group of police on the witness list who have probably dealt with hundreds of similar cases in the interim?

yeah, sure. they’re going to be able to single out this case from all the others. no problem.

“The percentage of Americans in the prison system
Prison system, has doubled since 1985,

They’re trying to build a prison,
They’re trying to build a prison,
They’re trying to build a prison, (for you and me to live in)
Another prison system,
Another prison system,
Another prison system. (for you and me to live in)”
- System of a Down, “Prison Song”