Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

March 12, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

My reflex on getting called to jury duty is still “how can I get out of it,” but I know that’s mostly the reptilian, fight-or-flight part of my brain. Who’s asking, and why are you picking on me? But these days one of my higher order functions is quicker to declare (just a little more loudly): I hope that I’ll be fit enough to serve.

When put on notice for jury duty, nobody wants their routine to be interrupted, to rub elbows with strangers, or spend days in an airless courtroom for the bus fare plus change you’ll be paid. The first impulse is running the other way. But on the flip side of “No-o-o-o” are some pretty persuasive “yeses.”

Jury duty is a call for neighbors to come together and decide whether someone else who lives or works here has failed to act in the ways they’re supposed to. The first question worth asking is whether you want to have a say in the matter or leave it to someone else? In the 2016 presidential election, 40% (or more than 92 million eligible voters) left it for somebody else to decide—perhaps the most alarming statistic in America today.

“Being a good citizen” used to be all most people needed. You didn’t ignore the jury summons, the IRS letter, or a chance to vote for your representatives. Well no longer.

More of us are scofflaws today—literally scoffing at the law—because (maybe, hopefully) these civic obligations will just forget about us altogether if we keep on disregarding them. Here in Philadelphia, so many ignore their calls to jury duty (175,000 out of 545,000 summons issued in 2015) that the court system has simply thrown up its hands when it comes to enforcement. Of those who respond, my guess is that many do so grudgingly. This is A VERY BIG (AND RESENTFUL) VOICE that says: “I just don’t care enough to help decide ‘what’s acceptable’ and ‘what’s not’ for those of us who live here.”

I’d argue that jury duty is at least as “citizen-gratifying” as marching with a protest sign, but there are other benefits that may sound less like a civics course for those who still need convincing.

I was picked for a jury this week, so these benefits are fresh in my mind. Lawyers never used to get picked, but this was the third time for me. Aside from seeing one of the jobs I do from an entirely different angle, the two most compelling pluses involve connection and storytelling. Here’s what I mean.

The deeper we dive into our phones, the more disconnected we become from other people. There is nothing like a closet-sized jury room to introduce you to members of your community. In your hours together, you share snippets about lives and work, while your deliberations together are an intimate opportunity to encounter them through their senses of right and wrong. Close quarters seldom get warmer than that.

Particularly in big cities, the other jurors are likely to come from different “walks of life” than your neighbors next door. The bubbles we increasingly inhabit have everyone looking more or less the same and agreeing about nearly everything. A Philadelphia jury allows very different bubbles to touch and merge for a brief common purpose, and that’s been a cause for optimism each time I’ve experienced it. When you fear that America’s sky is falling, you are reminded how FUNNY, WISE, HUMBLE and DECENT other members of the public can be when you come together this way.

The stories you see and hear as a juror also tend to make the ones you’d otherwise be following pale in comparison. Sometimes the vivid characters or plot lines emerge from friendships that develop among jurors. As often, they’re from the comedies and tragedies that are playing out in front of you in the courtroom.

The comedy is usually unintended. This week, for example, counsel for a widow suing her husband’s doctors had such a strong accent that when he introduced himself all he could communicate to us clearly was his first name. His elderly client entered the courtroom in a wheelchair that appeared to be stolen from one of the airlines. And the attorney for the doctors had a skirt that was so short she practically mooned us when she sat down after introducing herself. There are no second chances to make first impressions like that.

But the stakes involved in “who’s telling the better story” can also be soul crushing or inspiring. I’ve also been on a jury that had to decide whether to impose the death penalty. Before we were selected, the testimony from the potential juror pool on their beliefs about crime and punishment said more about personal character than you’re likely to hear anywhere else.

The defendant in this case had allegedly killed his confederate in a drug deal, along with several potential witnesses who were unlucky enough to be there too when it all went down. The prosecutors thought they were hotshots. The accused was a 20-something who seemed impossibly blasé about being there. Whose facts would we believe—whose story—with this many lives in the balance?

Every trial is not a murder trial, but it’s also true that the rest of our lives rarely approach the influential place where jurors go to work everyday. As a juror, you’re helping to decide how one storyline in your community draws to its conclusion. For a little of your time, you become a character in the narrative, part of its truth as well as its consequences.

A version of this essay appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 12, 2017. It also appeared in Newsday, the Charlotte Observer and Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Settling For vs. Endorsing a Candidate

August 17, 2016 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The difference between settling for and endorsing a candidate is known only to you. It’s a thin line, and the ballot box will never tell the rest of us which. That doesn’t mean there is no accountability for the choice that you’ll make. The personal accountability for what you’ll do (and won’t do) this time around seems sharper than ever.

The 2016 Election has devolved into A Parade of the Unacceptable. As well as the Embarrassing, the Puerile, the Deceitful and the Self-serving: all of it egged on by a largely complicit press eager to bring us “reality TV” as real life. But there are genuine risks and opportunities for each of us behind the entertainment curtain. A moral stake in the outcome. Our votes should be about more than wanting one candidate over another for American Idol.

When we manage a moment or two of seriousness, our asides seem to be about everything other than our convictions.

Here in heavily Democratic Philadelphia where I live, they say to me “Yes, there’ll be a little vomit in my mouth before I vote for her, but look at the alternative.” Republican friends elsewhere are more likely to say: “He’s such a bully that he’ll disrupt the entire system she and her cronies are trying to hold onto — and maybe that’s a good thing.” None are supporting a candidate for what they’ve stood for or that their lives have demonstrated when the television lights are off.

On the other hand, every single ballot in America will offer better alternatives in November. They’ll also allow you to write in somebody other than Pokeman, that is, not a cynical protest vote but the name of a man or woman you could actually follow as a leader. There is time between then and now to rally the like-minded around such a person, who might even be available to lead us next time if not this time.

Elections should be about what you believe in, not ulterior motives. While politics may be the art of compromise (like sausage-making), that’s not what it should be when you vote. Because sometimes — this time — their sausages aren’t worth eating.

And you don’t have to.

Also published in Medium @worklifereward.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo: What We Hold in Common

January 11, 2015 By David Griesing 5 Comments

From a certain perspective, could those men who were shot by French police yesterday be any more inspirational?

Masked, sheathed in black, executioners pointing their weapons at a pleading, fallen policeman outside Charlie Hebdo’s offices just before they fired their fatal shots. An image on the front page of every newspaper in the world that said “You’re watching, we’re doing.”

We just walked into the offices of some of your grown-ups, men and women who made their livings mocking our beliefs. We shouted to God while we mowed the clowns down in a hail of bullets. Who’s laughing now?

I walked into a kosher market, because it’s better when there’s some punishment for the Israeli oppressors too. I called the authorities and said, “You know who I am,” and oh, by the way, “If you take down my brothers, I’ll kill more of these Jews.” Yes, we talk to one another and work together. In fact, we’ll will be talking for years about we’ve accomplished today, and how little you could do about it.

“How just three brave men who believed in martyrdom could disrupt an arrogant nation and rivet the world’s attention” is our story. We kept our heads down long enough to escape surveillance by your overburdened security systems. There are just too many of us now for you to keep track of. And you will be reminded again that we are out here waiting. You will be reminded again very soon.

If you and your family feel unwelcomed by society in the West, or are unemployed, undervalued, feeling bored or disrespected or both just about anywhere else, this is a way to take your talent, redeem your life, find your inspiration. Yes. Jihadist recruiters had their second best week after 9/11 this week, while we mostly responded with… sentiment.

If you and I are not afraid, surely it’s not because of our drones, or American advisors trying to mobilize frightened Iraqi troops, or even those women brigades of Kurdish Peshmerga warriors who are maybe the closest thing we have to our own “superheroes” in the battle against militancy.

But beyond our own adolescent yearnings for fast solutions and simple justice, there is surely fear along with the tug of something deeper that calls upon us to engage with this asymmetrical challenge more seriously–far more seriously than this week’s opportunity to set down some flowers and light some candles on blood-stained sidewalks. A pretty cheap response, when it comes down to it, because it costs us so little. In a clash of world-views, do we need any more reminding that three lone gunmen (and the legions behind them) are much more serious about the drift of the world than we are?

But still…in the coming weeks, we’ll be debating racial profiling (“I am Ahmed,” after all) and how no American college would allow its student newspaper to print politically incorrect cartoons like Charlie Hebdo’s.

Surely we’ll buy more guns (because after Sandy Hook, gun advocates said the tragic might never have happened if those first grade teachers had had their own guns), and just as surely someone will use theirs to shoot somebody who looks like the Enemy. Then, of course, we’ll have polarizing arguments about what it all means. But talk is cheap too. In the coming weeks, it will still be our sentiment and endless talk around those who want to annihilate the freedoms that give us the luxury of all this sentiment and talk.

We take our values for granted. We’re no longer even sure about the ones that we share. But Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly were not confused. Going forward, there will be plenty of people who want to provide for us a black & white moral clarity (Ms. Le Pen if you’re in France, fill in the blank if you’re in the U.S.). But wouldn’t it be better if we started re-learning for ourselves how to become clearer about the values that we’re committed to?

In a recent op-ed entitled “Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education,” former dean of Yale College Donald Kagan wrote the following about what he fears we are (and are not) being taught in our schools today.

We look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political and ethical effects of education.

We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. . .. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work towards the common good and to defend our country when defense is needed. (emphasis added)

Maybe you cringed when you read the words “legitimate patriotism,” but Kagan is right.

We need to figure out how to stand together again, what we hold as precious in common and would be willing to champion together. They are the values that we would be willing to fight and even die for. Try to imagine what they are if you can. Try to imagine us coming together as citizens and finding the collective spirit to fight a war like World War II today (with all hands-on-deck, not just a few “volunteers”) and you can sense the gulf between our illusion of shared purpose and the reality.

We need to bridge this divide—moving from sentiment and debate to principles we share (whatever they are)—and do so quickly, before others jump in to do it for us when we’re even more afraid. After all, is there anyone who doubts that there is a gun pointed our way, and that it could be any of us there on the ground, pleading for life?

What is necessary is not cheap, but the alternatives, well we are starting to see the alternatives.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)

Grace Note

July 11, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East, a mother’s voice cuts through the terrible din. The words belonged to Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali had recently been kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank along with two other Jewish Israeli teens. In apparent revenge for these three deaths, Mohammed Abu Khdier, a Palestinian teenager, was kidnapped in Jerusalem and allegedly burned alive.

Fraenkel statement came after the traditional week of mourning for her son, and just hours after Mohammed’s funeral.

Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Nafali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem—the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country. . . No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.

You had to be listening to hear Fraenkel’s words over the bloodlust, the recrimination, the political exclamations, and the missile volleys between Israel’s cities and Gaza. It was a voice crying in the wilderness.

L’Chaim.

Samuel and Pearl Oliner began their book about rescuers of Jews and other victims during World War II with the following observation:

That people act in the service of their own self-interest is a maxim we are quite likely to accept. We are not even startled when they behave demonically. What we find difficult to accept or explain are behaviors that appear self-transcendent. (Preface at xviii)

Some of what is difficult “to accept or explain” comes from our reluctance to imagine the painful place that Fraenkel spoke from—to inhabit that sense of loss with her as she crossed a seething divide to grieve for another child who is tied by the cruelest of circumstances to her own. Because we hope it will never happen to us, that we’ll never have to find out what this kind of pain is like, we don’t take the five or ten minutes to envision for ourselves the possibilities that might exist beyond the pain. If we could be better at imagining “all the way through,” self-transcendence might be less of a puzzlement.

Sadly and far more often, graceful words and actions don’t break though the 24/7 overload to register with us at all. It’s the daily static of boredom, casual neglect, being hungry, bus exhaust, general shabbiness, deadlines, rudeness, fallen trees, gossip, bike riders yelling at cabdrivers, humidity, horniness, office chatter, cell phones, somebody complaining, body odor, feeling insecure, TV. The transcendent rarely breaks through it all, which means that on those occasions when it does, its break-through probably deserves its own place and time.

Prayer is partly the contemplation of exemplary stories, like Rachel Fraenkel’s: maybe on Sundays, or Friday nights after sundown, or at the end of the day before you go to sleep. Prayer never required a religion or specific words, but always calls for believing in something bigger than yourself, something that pulls you into a broader web of connectedness, and helps you to transcend the regular stuff of life.

Being quiet with your own ruminations is also required for prayer to happen, which reminds me of Tony Robbins tweet yesterday, that “Men prefer an electric shock to being alone with their thoughts.” (Silence is never as easy as it sounds.) Finally, it helps if you can recognize the intervals of grace that flutter like butterflies across everything else that clamors for your awareness.

They are often the places where hope can be found.

Morality Play

May 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Many who watched Frontline’s The United States of Secrets (May 13 and 20, 2014 on PBS) did so wanting to learn what happened before Edward Snowden’s massive disclosure of documents about the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. It was certainly the promised backstory—the bits and pieces gathered over the years and now stitched back together—that made me want to watch. But even more than the story itself, I was repeatedly overtaken by some of the characters in it. There are Shakespeare plays have had less courage, duplicity, guilelessness, arrogance and decency on display.

You can watch and judge for yourself.

Still from The United States of Secrets — Still from “The United States of Secrets”

When you do, keep an eye on 3 characters in particular, all of whom will interrupt the sidelong glance you’d usually cast in the direction of government bureaucrats:

Diane Roark, long-time staff member of the House Intelligence Committee;

Thomas Tamm, attorney and Justice Department liaison to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; and

Senior National Security Agency manager Robert Drake.

On a stage filled with dissemblers, careerists, and preening journalists, it is hard to take your eyes off of them. However you view opponents of our government’s surveillance programs, there can be no argument that each of these individuals risked their jobs, along with the quality of their future lives, to stand up for what they believed in the face of terrible odds.

Truly terrible odds.

Prevention of another 9-11 is what propelled the US reaction (or over-reaction) in the ensuing years. After more than a decade with no major terrorist incident on our soil, it is easy—much too easy—to discount the concerns that we all had much closer to that terrible day about the reasonable costs of our personal safety in a free and open society. Indeed, the courage in this documentary is directly proportionate to a threat we could all barely fathom on 9-12, and in the weeks, months and years that followed. The question could not be more important. What should you do (and those we rely on to protect us) do or not do, when caught up in the grip of fear?

By saying that the U.S. could not break its own laws to confront this threat, Roark, Tamm and Drake each challenged those they worked with in the government, as well as everyone in their chains of command (like vice-president Cheney) who were convinced that the fate of the nation would be undermined by their dissent. In order to do their jobs, these individuals were not only prepared to lose them, but also to be accused of having “blood on their hands” if their quibbling about legalities and moralities opened a fatal breach in the new “safety net” that was soon being assembled around us.

What they personally risked was like the excommunication that a former teacher of mine was threatened with when she encouraged a new dialogue within the Church about the nature of love; when she was told, in essence, “you cannot write about these things and be part of us anymore.” But being seen as “a Heretic,” “a Traitor” or “a Potential Murderer” didn’t stop (perhaps couldn’t stop) any of them, because they were not overtaken by their fears. Something even more basic and bedrock than that was involved, for better or worse.

You can catch a glimpse of these basic building blocks in Roark, Tamm and Drake. Because it is hard to speak from your conscience and easy to stay silent and go along, it can always be instructive to look in the faces of fairly ordinary and usually invisible people when they have simply refused to yield to larger forces.

My personal hope is that I can see in them something of my better self too.

Individuals who are working at the top of their games often learn about things that are far above their pay grades. Diane Roark was one of them, and in the immediate wake of 9/11 she started hearing about NSA surveillance of American citizens conducted without judicial sanction (that is, after a warrant arguing probable cause had been submitted and approved). She knew this was illegal, and began an impassioned harangue of her Congressional bosses. She argued with them. She documented what she kept learning and peppered them with memos. People connected to the government kept talking to her, because they were concerned too.

What Roark didn’t know was that the White House was also briefing her bosses on the House Intelligence Committee. She didn’t know that once these Congressional leaders were told about the new surveillance, how many of them felt that they could no longer exercise oversight, because the specter of having “blood on their hands” effectively silenced them.

Because Roark was unaware of this, she kept trying to convince her Committee members and, in an expression of frustration, was finally told to take her suspicions up with General Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA. Her bosses knew it was a dead-end, but the evasive answers she received and the assurance she finally got of authorization “from the top” made her more concerned than ever. She redoubled her efforts to convince somebody, anybody, that this program was “unethical, immoral, politically stupid, illegal and unconstitutional.” That was her job, after all. You can still hear the disbelief in her voice that the government she was working so hard to serve was acting in this manner. Roark resigned in frustration a year after 9/11, having dared to raise her voice, both loudly and clearly, when our leader’s fears were at their highest.

Thomas Tamm was the Justice Department attorney who submitted requests for warrants made by federal investigators to the special court charged with either authorizing or rejecting the surveillance of American citizens suspected of terrorism. In other words, he was literally one of the lynchpins in the pre-9/11 safeguards that had been established to protect citizens from being monitored by their government without probable cause.

Tamm came from a family of law enforcement professionals. His father and grandfather both held senior positions at the FBI. Like Roark, Tamm also started hearing about surveillance reports that were not tied to any standing warrant.

His immediate superior was repeatedly unresponsive when he raised his concerns with her (although she talked about probable illegality in a telling aside). Months passed and he went “outside his chain” to a Congressional staffer involved in government oversight but was stonewalled again. It was clear that the government was going around the job he was trying to do with a secret and unauthorized program. Unable to get any kind of response to his concerns from within the government, in a fateful move Tamm called a reporter covering post-9/11 security issues at the New York Times before, in the words of the narrator “disappear[ing] back into the bureaucracy.”

Angry about leaks to the press, Vice President Cheney’s office started a “manhunt for leakers” during this time, an initiative that continued under President Obama (despite assurances while he was campaigning that there will be “no more ignoring of the law when it is inconvenient on my watch”). His home as well as Roark’s were ultimately raided by the FBI, and both had their documents as well as computers seized. Both left their government jobs and endured years of uncertainty (and in Tamm’s case depression) facing possible arrest, although neither ultimately was. In the documentary, Tamm’s quiet sadness about these events is easily as compelling as Roark’s agitation.

Senior NSA manager Robert Drake was also alarmed when he started to suspect that his own agency was conducting warrantless surveillance. It was his job to find existing capabilities within the NSA that could be mobilized post-9/11.

The National Security Agency was chartered after World War II to ensure that there were no more surprises like Pearl Harbor, so it was not surprising that it had developed a program called “Thin Thread” that could eavesdrop on every American’s electronic communications, but with the built-in privacy protections mandated by law. (All personal data that the program captured was encrypted until a judge deemed that it could be read upon presentation of a warrant.) When Drake told his superiors about Thin Thread, he was surprised when they told him they were “going with another program.” He soon discovered that the other program was essentially Thin Thread without the legal safeguards.

If possible, Drake was even more dogged than Roark or Tamm in his efforts to convince his superiors to stop the warrantless surveillance. Unlike them however, as he continued to raise concerns his job duties were taken out from under him. He bypassed his chain of command and wrote directly to General Keith Alexander, by then the head of the NSA, that the warrantless surveillance program was “out of control” and needed to be “reigned in.” In the meantime, his worst fears were being confirmed by the New York Times’ reporting.

For 4 years, the stonewalling continued and his frustration festered. Drake ultimately reached out to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Before long he too was caught in the same dragnet for leakers as the others. When the FBI raided his home, for hours all they wanted to talk about with him was the press reports, and all he talked about in return was how law enforcement should be pursuing lawbreakers elsewhere in the government.

Prosecutors decided to make an example out of Drake, indicting him in 2010 under the Espionage Act because he allegedly had classified documents in his home. He exhausted his financial resources on his defense. After repeatedly threatening him to plead guilty, his attorneys successfully argued that the documents in question had previously been made public by the government itself. On the eve of his trial, all serious charges were dropped. Drake was required to pay a $25 fine for misuse of his government computer.

Roark, Tamm and Drake raised concerns about warrantless surveillance and assumed the attendant risks because the proper handling of intelligence gathering was at the core of their jobs. It was their business to know what was legal and illegal, and unlike most others in the government, they raised their voices and never bowed before the strenuous efforts that were made to stop them from doing so.

Whether they deserved what their principled tenacity brought them or suffered in vain is not for me to decide. On the other hand, when your work—your very job description—brings you knowledge of wrongdoing, you essentially have two choices: to raise your voice and assume the risks, or to remain silent and go along. The morality play that is The United States of Secrets is really about some of the ordinary characters who made the more extraordinary of these two choices.