I’ve only been to jury duty once, I think. It was probably twenty years ago. I’ve never been back because they mail you a jury summons and I haven’t done anything other than dump my mailbox into the trash for the last I-don’t-know-how-long.  I honestly don’t get anything but junk, so I just stopped checking it.

Side note: if you’re mailing me something, gimme a heads up.

The other reason is that I don’t want to have to decide someone’s fate.  Not in a court full of political judges and shady lawyers. I don’t want to pick whose manipulation I believed more.  It’s a huge responsibility, even on trivial crimes, so for this is better to get the right civil law attorneys from sites as gibsonhugheslaw.com/civil-law-attorney/ which always will help doing the right thing in court houses.

Of course, not all crimes deserve death. There are varying degrees of wrong, and I think we forget that sometimes.  I don’t just mean in actual courts, either.  I can’t count the people that have been knocked off their professional perches recently over past tweets and comments.

Part of me loves seeing the world cleaned up a little bit. The other part of me is terrified.  While I know I’ve never crossed any of the big lines – there’s definitely no intentional racism or hate towards any marginalized groups in my past, and more importantly, I just don’t have those beliefs – I also know that I’ve used social media as a bit of a writer’s room for a decade plus. I’m sure I’ve tossed some controversially loose ideas into the internet’s maw.

It’s even scarier that the people doing all this kingslaying are just regular people.  It’s an interesting dynamic.  The mob can bring anyone down now without due process, and there is simply no defense against it. Voluntary jury duty, all comers taken.

Just look at James Gunn. Companies are mortified at the idea that one of their employees might have a dirty past.

Well, we all do.

The problem is, no one cares about anybody else’s shortcomings unless they’re at the top.  It’s starting to trickle down, and there are plenty of videos of everyday people saying horrible things, and yes, they get dropped too. But we still endow those people with bigger-than-life attributes.  BBQ Becky? Permit Patty?  C’mon. We just like felling giants.

I am pro the Me Too movement. I consider myself an ally.  But I also believe there are degrees of severity there as well. You can’t argue that Bill Cosby and Garrison Keillor did anywhere near the same thing, yet Keillor’s legacy has been stripped possibly barer than Cosby’s. I’m not defending anyone by the way; I excused myself from jury duty, remember?

But imagine if every crime, no matter how small, carried the death sentence?  It’s no different. Imagine if a cop killed a guy for something as simple as—okay, bad example…

Have you ever had a bad waiter?  There are definitely different levels of bad there.  There’s he forgot my ranch dressing bad, and then there’s he-made-out-with-my-date-at-the-table-while-I-ate-my-dressingless-salad bad. They’re different. I’m not tipping one of those guys.

I believe they should be punished accordingly, too.

And probably by the manager, not some table who was there earlier in the day and read an accounting of my story on Twitter long after they left. Or worse, by someone who doesn’t even ever go to that restaurant.

But we live in a world of recreational outrage now. Weaponized anger. It’s scary, man.

I guess my point is, I try not to participate. It’s tempting, and getting a lick in on a “bad guy” feels good sometimes, but ultimately, I just become part of the bigger problem.

It doesn’t mean the bad guys should walk free. It just means that we need some checks and balances before the list of parking violators on death row outnumbers the murderers.  It’s important to be the voice of reason in a sea of insanity.

Digital everything has taken the humanity out of us. Let’s put a little back in, shall we?