The room where you leave your body to find truth

We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

I wish I could take credit for that bit of deep wisdom, but I wasn’t the first one to say it. That honor goes to Anais Nin, the early 20th century diarist who knew all about seeing the world. After all, she could call several countries home—France, Cuba, Spain, and the United States—and she spent much of her life writing the kind of stories that only men wrote in her day.

I thought of her quote today as the world still grumbled from the after-shocks of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case.

For the record, I am a fence-sitter when it comes to the verdict in that case. I did not hang upon the details through every twist and turn of the days leading up to trial, as many others did. I did not tune in to CNN, surround myself with bushels of snacks to get me through the day, and dash off “OMG!” tweets to everybody I knew at the end of each day of testimony.

In short, I treated the Zimmerman case exactly as I treated the Jodi Arias case and the Casey Anthony case and the O.J. Simpson case: I ignored it and waited for a carefully selected jury of American citizens to decide what happened.

Don’t ask me if I am outraged now that it’s over. Don’t ask me if my faith in the system has been restored. I have no idea. I didn’t follow it. Not at all.

But having once served as the jury foreman on a murder trial, I can say one thing with certainty about the Zimmerman case and about all those other cases:

We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

That is why few people can honestly say that their opinion changed as they watched the intricate details of a televised trial. If they went into the trial believing that Trayvon Martin was a sneaky punk who got what he deserved, they breathed a sigh of relief at the end. If they started out believing that George Zimmerman was an overzealous, bigoted, wannabe hero, they shook their fists at the verdict.

But most made that decision long before the end of testimony. Or even before the start of it.

Because we don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

The reasons we take our stands vary, depending on the lenses we peer through when we view the world. Sometimes our choices are drawn on gender lines. Or maybe on racial lines. Or generational lines, economic lines, or sexual orientation lines. Or maybe all at once.

Long before the trial, the President of the United States said, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.” There is no telling why he felt that his imaginary son would not look like George Zimmerman. Maybe because the President’s oldest child is about the same age as Martin but only half the age of Zimmerman. Maybe because the President’s daughter Malia has as unusual a name as Trayvon did, instead of a common name like George. Maybe because Trayvon Martin was Obama-slender and George Zimmerman wasn’t.

Or maybe for other reasons.

In any case, the President of the United States isn’t very different from the rest of us when it comes to seeing the world — at least in this case. He looked at other people’s lives, and he saw his own.

In the murder trial that I served on, the two victims and the three alleged perpetrators were all the same race. Thankfully, we would not have to wrestle with wondering if our racial biases were driving our deliberations.

But on the first day of jury deliberations — before we had even begun to discuss the testimony — one juror said, “I just can’t imagine sentencing that boy to death.”

I asked her why, and she said she had a boy about the same age — in his early 20’s. She couldn’t imagine how that boy’s mother could survive seeing her son in jail, or worse. She didn’t want to be responsible for any of that, because she knew how she would feel if it were her son.

After lengthy discussion, we jurors unanimously agreed that it was our job simply to arrive at the truth. And once we had decided that, it was the judge’s job to apply that truth to arrive at justice.

And so, with some difficulty, each of us did our best to separate our lives from the lives — and deaths — of those involved in the case. As each piece of testimony was examined, we had to resist the temptation to say, “My friend’s sister had something like that happen to her, and…”

Moment by moment, we had to remind ourselves that this case wasn’t about us. It was about finding the truth, whatever that truth might be. Whether or not we liked what truth we found.

It was about trying to see the world as it is. Not as we are.

It was hard to shed ourselves of ourselves, but it was necessary if we were to help restore justice for the slain or freedom for the innocent. Still more difficult is knowing if we fully overcame seeing the world as we are, instead of as it is — even if we believe in our deepest hearts that we did.
In the end, that jury deliberation room felt like no other room in our lives, before or since.

I am glad I was there.

I never want to be there again.

Not even on the couch in my living room.

• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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