For most people, a summons to jury duty has roughly the attractiveness of an invitation to spend a week relaxing in the waiting room of the local Department of Motor Vehicles. Certainly this was my response when I received my own summons recently, and my expectations were, to be honest, borne out by the experience, which consisted chiefly of sitting
with over a hundred other souls—sans cell phones, computers, and other electronic forms of work or entertainment—in a sparsely furnished room in the basement of the Ramsey County Courthouse and…waiting.

(As an aside, I should note that I had for company a Macalester senior, a Macalester alumna, and a member of the Macalester staff, demonstrating clearly that the college is doing its part to keep the wheels of justice grinding.)

Just once during the week I was called, together with two dozen of my peers, into an actual courtroom, where each of us was asked the same series of questions, some biographical
and some of a more philosophical nature, these last, apparently, designed to identify those lacking all sense of fairness, judgment, or basic human decency. (Not surprisingly, every one of the panel acknowledged under oath to being fair, discerning, and decent.) After a suitable interval, I was apparently deemed a less-than-ideal juror by the defense or prosecuting attorney or both (or maybe by the judge, for that matter) and dispatched back to the waiting room in the basement to—naturally—wait some more.

My jury service—or, more accurately, my jury availability, since I was never in fact impaneled—happened to take place the week after the Iowa caucuses and during the week of the New Hampshire presidential primaries, which reminded me of another frequently experienced adventure in tedium: waiting in line at the polling place, sometimes for more than an hour and frequently, in Minnesota, in the rain or snow, in order to exercise the right to cast my ballot.

Such moments are often the source of complaint, and I confess to being a regular complainer: my time as a juror-in-waiting, for instance, caused me to miss two important conference calls and to crowd into subsequent weeks all the various meetings, tasks, and appointments
that had been necessarily delayed. All this, I am given to complain, in order to do absolutely nothing at excruciating length.

Yet in my more reflective moments I am inclined to recognize that it is precisely the tedium, the sheer and numbing uneventfulness of such activities that underscores the extent to which democratic practices are embedded in American society. My jury service also coincided with ongoing spasms of nascent or failed democratic activity in such countries as Pakistan and Kenya, activity that was proving to be chaotic, divisive, and more than occasionally deadly—but never boring.

There are, in other words, many aspects of participatory democracy that we in the United States are inclined to take for granted because they have become routine, including the functioning of an independent judiciary, the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers, and the smooth and civil transition of power from one political party to another. It is when such activities become exciting, when they begin to shock or to disrupt the quotidian flow of events, that they tend to be most in jeopardy.

And so, hard as it is to accept, we should be grateful that being called to jury service, casting a vote, and attending a public hearing are by and large boring activities. They are boring because their existence and relative commonality are taken for granted, and they are taken for granted because they are so deeply woven into our social and political fabric—into the very way that we imagine ourselves. During the vast majority of times, and in the majority of places in the world today, this has remained far from the case.

The danger, of course, is that we are liable to confuse the routine with the unimportant. The fact that most of us show up as expected to serve as jurors and stand in line in the rain to cast ballots and accept without violent revolution the results of elections are matters about which we should be deeply proud and fiercely protective. It is within such unremarkable soil that free civil society—a most remarkable thing—establishes its deepest roots.

Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester, writes a regular column for Macalester Today. He can be reached at rosenbergb@macalester.edu.