Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Jury Duty

At jury duty today a college student sat next to me with her Mac. Half an hour into the morning she said “OK, my name’s on the list. If I just left, they wouldn’t know, right?” “You must never have done this before.” She’s attending UCSB, wants to be a teacher, and works at a preschool. An hour later she said “There should be some way around the system. Do you know if I could find out when they were going to call a group? Then I could just show up for that.” “Do you believe in the jury system?” “What? No.” “You mean, if you were falsely accused of a crime, you wouldn’t want a jury to be there for you?” “Yeah, I’d want THAT, but I just don’t think I should have to waste my time doing this. I didn’t even register to vote.” Most of the young people I’m connected with are caring, concerned people who are doing good things in the world. They are interested in community service and they want to make a difference, but they also seem to have more of an entitlement attitude than older people. Every once in awhile, people from this twenty-something generation show a side that is incredibly selfish. Mr. Rogers didn’t mean that just because you were special the world should wait on you!

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