Today, I had to go to jury duty and it was a surreal experience, as jury duty tends to be. Of course, if you are a resident of the District of Columbia, you probably have to do jury duty more often than residents anywhere else in the United States: we are small and the pool to pick from is smaller but ooh are our courts active. Then again, maybe that’s the thing with places with a small population. I suppose I could do some research on this but it would go against the courtroom spirit of being told that you’re in front of a juicy case but you can’t look it up it even as they repeat the name of the accused over and over. Let the spirit of the court watch over these proceedings.

Is it wrong to ask things of people and hope that they rise to the challenge? It seems like a good thing, to believe the best in people and to believe in the ideals of this country of ours; but then again, we are here. We are in a place where a terrible scenario has come to fruition– where a bloated billionaire who exchanged money for power is trying to dismantle the government in a nonsensical way, and we have some of his most breathless toadies refusing to accept that this approach hurts us all.

Of course, at the heart of all this trouble lies the undeniable fact that “doing your own research” does not come naturally to people. I’ve known more than one Millennial luddite, frustrated because they don’t know how to do basic parameters on a search engine. No, I don’t mean do they know how to do a Boolean search or anything even mildly fancy. They would just sit there, asking, “So, what do I ask?”

This is how I know that people doing their own research probably aren’t.

Sitting at the courtroom, seeing fifty people following instructions calmly and quickly and being deferent to others whom they’ve never met before was inspirational. At no point was there some weird belligerent asshole shouting back that they didn’t believe in the Constitution, or that they needed to do their own research and question the part about the Founding Fathers being serious about demanding that all citizens serve as a judge of their peers.

It was just fifty people patiently waiting to fulfill their duty, and we all did. And just like my group went through, other groups do this daily at courts all around the country. I’m sure there are indeed people who fight back and who get themselves arrested, etc. but remember– I’m not doing research right now. I’m just going by what I saw. And what I saw is that even though everything is going to hell in a hand basket, parts of it still work like a Norman Rockwell painting. And maybe that’s all I needed today.