It got me thinking about a few things, and reminded me of an analogy I cane up with years ago when I was on the fire department. Specifically, that it's almost like there's an entire different world existing in parallel with the "normal" one most of us here inhabit--a world where people just do things that seem completely alien to everyday "normal people" like sell themselves for a hit, pick up girls at gas stations to pimp them out, buy drugs for their own kids then kick them out, and so on. We know intellectually that this goes on but it can be a bit jarring to realize it's happening in the neighborhoods you drive through on the way home from work, yet you don't see it. We know it's there...but it's so easily forgotten if you aren't forced to confront it. After the trial I looked up the locations where all this took place, and they're places just off the roads I take bringing my son home from school or going into town for appointments. As I noted I'd been exposed to this concept before... but it's still sobering. And by corollary, it struck me how blessed our family/friends are to not be caught up in stuff like this, as much from circumstance and luck and social environment as good choices and good parenting.
It's also given me some (age-adjusted) talking points with said nine year old son, regarding drugs, getting mixed up in the wrong crowds, and the things that those rapidly lead to. I still don't think he truly gets it, but maybe something sank in? We're particularly concerned with him since his ADHD/ODD may make him more susceptible to falling into such situations as he gets older.
But on the bright side... we had a hell of a "team" for our jury. We got along really well, we all paid close attention (so much so that the judge even complimented us on that in open court--not sure what that says about other juries though
), and basically discussed and thought things over like a jury is really supposed to. Wanted to post this because I'm honestly still processing a lot of this past week and putting thoughts on paper LCD helps with that. I think we're all still not going to sleep well for at least a few days, not just because of the "content" of the case but also the magnitude of what we were doing--the line "whatever we decide here is going to change these peoples' lives forever" came up more than once, and even knowing we came to the best decision we could after a lot of discussion, it's still going to churn around upstairs a while. I've made serious (potentially) forever-affecting-others'-lives decisions before but this was probably the most in-my-face and personal one.
