In April of 2005, I was eliminated from a pool of prospective jurors, or
"booted off a jury."
I trust that most reading this are American, so I don't have to spend time explaining the concept of "jury duty." Anyway, the reason I was eliminated is what makes the story interesting.
It was a medical malpractice case. A physician, who was present at the trial, had been accused of wrongdoing because he noted "suspected liver disease" in a patient's chart. In fact, later tests showed that the patient did not have liver disease. He was, however, denied life insurance because of the doctor's scribblings. Unfortunately, not long after he was turned down for the policy, the patient developed an inoperable brain tumor and died. His wife and young child were left without the financial support his insurance policy would have provided and were suing the doctor.
After we prospective jurors took our seats, the judge asked:
"Do any of you have biases or beliefs that might affect your ability to weigh this case impartially, based on information you hear in the trial?"
The whole premise of the trial, that a single physician was somehow more liable for this tragic outcome than an insurance corporation that had denied a claim on demonstrably faulty information, made me uncomfortable. So my hand went up and I said something like the following:
"I have no medical training. I don't know if this doctor's note was unprofessional, or amounted to a violation of protocol. But I have a deep sympathy for workers on the front lines, in almost any occupation," I told the courtroom. "Questions of negligence or misconduct aside, line workers often have to make difficult decisions, going on partial information, and with inadequate resources. It follows that mistakes are made in work settings, sometimes very serious ones, for which the individual who made the error cannot fairly be blamed. With all due respect to the plaintiff, I fear that in this case, the physician is being scapegoated."
"Thank you for being forthright about your biases. You are dismissed from the trial," said the judge.
My showing concern about the working conditions of those directly involved in a situation, instead of a willingness to take what the paid chatterers said at face value, rendered me "biased," as far as the judge was concerned. I was unfit to serve on a jury.
My jury experience happened several months before Katrina, when we had the opportunity to hear Louisiana's lovely Senator Mary Landrieu, on tape with CNN's Anderson Cooper, congratulating the Washington administration on its efficient response to Katrina. Cooper responded memorably:
Senator, I'm sorry... for the last four days, I have been seeing dead bodies here in the streets of Mississippi and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other -- I have to tell you, there are people here who are very upset and angry, and when they hear politicians thanking one another, it just, you know, it cuts them the wrong way right now, because there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman has been laying in the street for 48 hours, and there is not enough facilities to get her up. Do you understand that anger?
What ties the courtroom and the Mary Landrieu stories together is one of the most commonly recurring descriptors on DailyKos: "on the ground," used in phrases like "reality on the ground," and "facts on the ground."
The expression, "reality on the ground," implies that there is another "reality." Shall we call this second existential plane "reality from the air"?
You can't make out much detail down below. Not that you'd want to. The seats are fine, so's the sunshine through the window. The ride's smooth--no turbulence.
"Reality from the air" was Mary Landrieu's perspective, in the ghastly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It seemed obvious to me, in an emperor-has-no-clothes kind of way, that "reality from the air" also described the perspective of the prosecution, and perhaps the judge, at the doctor's trial. They knew nothing about the nuts-and-bolts of the physician's daily experience, constraints he worked under, and they cared even less.
I left the highly conservative religion I was raised in, to which I had real family and cultural connections, because of the "reality from the air" perspective of its leaders. They drummed it into me that I was put on earth to bear the children of a righteous man. My own desires did not count for a fig, not when the leaders had an agenda to sell--one with the perpetuation of their own status at its heart.
I beg your pardon. You do not speak for me.
It's been a refrain in every democratic movement for human dignity you can think of, from antislavery, to feminism, to antiwar, to labor, to civil rights, to queer acceptance, and so on. It implies muting the "reality-from-the-air" voice, and speaking up from the ground, from the fray.
You aren't entitled to say what we want and need. We'll tell you that just fine, thanks.
We don't need your "spiritual guidance," your legislation, your pronouncements, or any other facet of your "expertise"--except when it comes to accomplishing OUR will.
I have not had an employer who's offered me health insurance since 2001. It's an issue, since I cannot purchase affordable health insurance coverage on my own as an "individual subscriber." I have a "pre-existing condition" that tells insurance corporations I'm a bad risk, that I wouldn't be profitable for them to underwrite, because I might actually need healthcare.
Am I furious? Do you have to ask if I'm furious? My story is legion, is the thing. It's practically cliché. In the richest country in the world, that is what makes my experience so appalling.
Of my fury and determination regarding healthcare reform are born a "reality-from-the-ground" self-confidence I may not otherwise have known I had. I've lost my awe for the cryptic analyses of the talking heads who tell us reasons why having a publicly accountable government agency funding all healthcare for all residents is "unfeasible." Talk about irrelevant, these people are miles above my head. They're airborne. It's suddenly clear to me that I don't need a master's degree in healthcare policy, a Ph.D. in economics, or a tenure in legislation, to know that having for-profit insurance funding healthcare is all fucked-up, that the health-insurance lobby sleeps with the legislators and fucks healthcare up for everyone, and that we can do so much better.
I grasp, with my plain-ordinary, on-the-ground brain, that a move to single-payer healthcare, where we've had competing private bureaucracies funding it, wouldn't be all that "radical." Most other industrialized countries do it, and guess what: they don't have America's soaring healthcare costs, or its shocking health outcomes.
Healthcare is significant for me, because it's been the first issue to really galvanize my activism. But it's just one of many. These days, you can pretty much take your pick.
Conservative political ideology, favoring the interests of big money, has taken off over the past 30 years or so, because it's been bundled with the authoritarian pronouncements of a religion not too far different, if you must know, from the one I came up in. People find certainty comforting. Particularly, in difficult times, people are comforted by reliance on others' "expertise."
But we're smarter than they are about the circumstances of our own lives! Numbers of us wake up to that fact, and the neoconservative ideology, which once seemed so soundly dominant, begins to teeter. The every-day working people, the garbage collectors, the computer programmers, the bus drivers, the schoolteachers, the mothers and fathers, are the ones "on the ground"--not the well-groomed lobbyists and politicians, who are trying to write the rules we all play by.
OK, deep-down, I wasn't all that worried about that physician being tried for malpractice. I was using him as example. Yeah, having to interrupt his practice and sit in this courtroom for two weeks while the trial played out must have been inconvenient, even humiliating, for him. But he could afford a good defense team, and he was going to come out fine. I mean, you look at it one way, if the legal system had to pillory one little individual just trying to do his or her job, thank God it was a physician, not some single mother earning the minimum wage.
Maybe there's some justice in the universe. Maybe the doctor in the trial I observed was a haughty bastard, used to approaching things "from the air," and not used to taking his patients' realities into consideration, at all. For a few days, at least, he got to taste "the ground," relative to the paid chatterers.