Daily Socotra

16 May 2006

Civic Duty

I am commanded to report to room 302 in the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Virginia this morning, not later than 0845. There is no place to park, they say, and recommend public transit to arrive.

I have an alternative to my civic duty, which is a $100 fine or three days in jail, or both

I have it all worked out in my head, when I need to be where, and so the morning is on a fast track. They told me on the automated jury information line that cell phones are not permitted in the courthouse, and I presume that expands to include wireless connectivity to my laptop computer.

I think I am going to be cut off. It is not a pleasant prospect, going cold turkey with so much going on. I have a stack of magazines to take, and they say there is a lunch break. But what am I supposed to do on the break without a cell phone? Even most of the security services around town permit you to have your phone, if it is disabled, or at least provide little lock boxes for the devices outside the secure area.

I am not comfortable being cut off, with only the court to provide information. I have been dreading this day, which I anticipate will combine the best features of a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles and a root canal.

I am going to miss the reaction to the President's border security speech last night, though perhaps the prospective jury pool will talk about it. He said last night he is going to send as many as 6,000 national guardsman to the border. I tried to calculate the impact of the deployment. If the six thousand stood fingertip to fingertip, and assuming a span of six feet, that would enable us to go man-on-man with the migrants for nearly 36,000 feet, or over seven miles of border.

Maybe they will spread them out a little. The President said the Texas-Mexican border alone is almost 1,200 miles long, or approximately 1.2 million Guardsman, finger-tip to finger-tip, but my calculations were in nautical miles, so I might be off a little bit.

Anyway, the numbers are almost as vast as the number of people who have already scampered across the border, or somewhere north of twelve million.

This has been going on so long that it does not appear to be a border policy as a change of sovereignty. The President talked about “catch and release” in his speech, which is another bizarre feature of our system. Undocumented Mexican are returned to the border after capture and sent back across.

Undocumented persons from nations without a contiguous border are assigned a court date and permitted to walk free. The President said most of them are never seen again.

The Mexican press is in an uproar about the militarization of the border. I'm not sure what seven miles of the frontier they are looking at, but I imagine it is pretty intimidating.

There was more to the President's address, but it was not directed as much to us in televisionland as it was to the Congress. The House has passed a bill with some fairly harsh provisions. The Senate has crafted an alternative that appears calculated not to offend the people who are sneaking in.

No one is happy with either, and having left the barn door open so long, I am astonished that anyone thinks there are any horses left inside.

I'd worry about it more, but I have my own fish to fry with the Federal Government this morning. It may be incapable of doing something like defending the land approaches to the border. But I am absolutely confident that it will eventually link my phone records to the Jury Information line and dispatch a car of Special Agents to come and get me if I fail to appear.

This is not like catch-and-release, after all. This is a civic duty.