I got called for jury duty. I was genuinely excited about it.
I know how that sounds. Most people treat a jury summons the way they treat a parking ticket — an inconvenience to survive and escape as fast as possible. They show up hoping to get dismissed. They rehearse reasons why they can’t possibly serve. A lot of them succeed. The pool I was in got dismissed entirely before we ever saw a courtroom — cases settled or continued at the last minute, most likely. I drove home without getting to do the one thing I actually showed up to do.
I was genuinely disappointed.
Here’s what most people don’t stop to think about: there are exactly two mechanisms by which an ordinary person can directly participate in and affect their democracy. Two. Voting and jury service. That’s the list. Everything else is indirect. You can write your representatives, call their offices, show up to town halls, hit the streets in peaceful protest. All of that matters, and all of it is worth doing. But none of it puts you in the room where the decision actually gets made. Voting and jury duty do.
And we’re walking away from both.
When engaged people opt out of jury service, what’s left is a pool of whoever couldn’t find a way out. That’s who decides whether someone goes to prison. That’s who interprets the law as it applies to a real human life. The quality and fairness of that decision depends entirely on who’s in the room — and we’ve collectively decided we’d rather not be there.
Voting is under a different kind of pressure. It’s not being abandoned so much as it’s being actively dismantled. Restrictions accumulate. Districts get drawn to dilute. And then the cynicism sets in — my vote doesn’t matter, the system is rigged, nothing ever changes — and people disengage voluntarily, finishing the job that suppression started. The fatalism becomes self-fulfilling. When people stop participating because they believe their participation is meaningless, they guarantee that it is.
I understand the cynicism. I genuinely do. The systems are flawed. The outcomes are often unjust. Powerful interests have enormous structural advantages over ordinary people in almost every arena of civic life. None of that is wrong.
But the answer to a flawed democracy isn’t to leave the room. When you skip jury duty, the jury doesn’t go away — it just gets filled by someone else, someone who may not share your values or your commitment to fairness. When you don’t vote, you don’t register a protest. You just hand more weight to everyone who did show up.
People bled for the right to vote. They were beaten, jailed, and killed for it. The right to a jury of your peers was considered fundamental enough to put in the Constitution twice. These weren’t handed down from above. They were fought for, because the people fighting understood something that’s easy to forget from a comfortable distance: direct participation in governance is rare, hard-won, and not guaranteed to last.
Most people throughout most of human history never had it. A lot of people alive right now don’t have it.
We have it. And we’re treating it like a chore.
I’ll get another summons eventually. I’ll show up again.