TexNewMex

A few years ago, the Las Cruces Community Theatre revived "Twelve Angry Men," the 1955 drama that later produced a landmark Hollywood film. It depicts a jury considering a homicide case. Initially they are eager to convict, but one juror is not convinced and proceeds to ask questions which lead to revelations of personal prejudice and hasty assumptions. It is an extended lesson in the importance of reasonable doubt as a standard of proof, especially when considering death or imprisonment of a defendant.

When I took my seat at the theatre, I assumed I would be watching a period piece, an homage to a classic drama, nothing especially provocative. To my surprise, there were clucks and whispers through the first act, and at intermission I remained in my seat to eavesdrop on patrons seated around me. It was startling to hear parties to several conversations, people who might be called to serve on a jury one day, who seemed to be encountering the idea of presumptive innocence for the first time. That we assume a defendant is innocent until they are proven guilty, and that such proof must meet a rigorous standard in a public and accountable process, struck many adults in this downtown theatre as a strange and radical proposition. After nearly 60 years, the play remained relevant after all, because it was readily apparent that some in the audience had forgotten or never been taught certain fundamental principles.

The United States is a republic built on a bedrock of moral knots: the darkness of slavery, genocide, and white supremacy juxtaposed with some of history's most audacious sentiments of human equality and freedom, and an experiment in republican democracy that has been creeping inexorably toward war, plutocracy, and despotism. According to one legend about our founding, some people approached Benjamin Franklin and asked him what form of government was being drafted, and he said: "A republic, if you can keep it."

To keep it, we need to keep teaching and remembering certain ideas, lest coercive power become our only civic value: the idea that government should not endorse one religion over others, that a person has a right to a trial and is innocent until proven guilty, that certain rights are "inalienable" and not to be granted or taken away by government, that government power needs checks and balances, that people have a duty to discipline or even overthrow a government that neglects or abuses them. When these ideas are not ignored altogether, they are controversial today.

What we have grown used to, and come to expect from our rulers, is swift judgment and unchecked power expanded by successive presidents of both parties. Our popular entertainment exalts shooting from the hip, not as recklessness but as "clarity" and "resolve," the qualities of a strong leader. An entire generation has grown into adulthood since President George W. Bush's doctrine of preventive detention, torture, and breaking down constitutional limits on government's power to surveil, detain, and collect data about citizens. They saw Barack Obama, a president from the other party, maintain much of this apparatus (minus torture) and go further still, even ordering lethal strikes on American citizens with no judicial process.

Society has passively allowed civil liberty to erode by neglecting civic values and the collective power we hold yet rarely use. If society does not teach republican principles, the people cannot discipline government with vigilant and courageous action, leaving us vulnerable when a true despot inherits the powers of the presidency.

Algernon D'Ammassa is Desert Sage. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.