A quick meditation on growing up.
I got a speeding ticket; there's a couple traps along Taconic Parkway in NY and occasionally you get nabbed; some of the traps are run by towns that barely overlap the parkway, and you get written up and a plea guilty/not-guilty.
I got a speeding ticket; there's a couple traps along Taconic Parkway in NY and occasionally you get nabbed; some of the traps are run by towns that barely overlap the parkway, and you get written up and a plea guilty/not-guilty.
Here's something I feel a lot of people know and some don't. In general, it's good to plea not guilty. You then go to what is clearly listed as a'pre-trial" meeting and the town DA will then broker a deal with you for a non-speeding fine. No license points for you, $ for them.
9am and there's about 30 of us there, all walks. I dressed like I do so I had some nice conversations with tired people, and they loaded us into the court through a metal detector and then called groups of us to go talk to the DA in his office.
I got offered littering on the highway, which I thought was fine. This is all pantomime, I'll take it, I don't want to raise my insurance, and I added another bend on the Taconic to slow down at to the other 12.
After you negotiate, you still need to go back to the judge and get called and the whole thing. I was called something like 25th, so I got to see a bunch of the other "cases", where the judge goes "You are being charged with this, do you take this plea, go here to pay."
Assembly line, really. You find out what your fine is when you get there and if it's too much, you can always say "I've reconsidered" and you can go off and go through an actual court case if you want, etc. Nobody's too railroaded here, I assure you. It was pretty light.
Twice before my turn, I watched kids get up. 17, 18. In both cases, they were in full tie and jacket and whatever pants a kid thinks goes with a jacket which it never does. They also had their dads with them, dressed in full suits, sometimes clutching a folder. Hard.
And in both cases, I watched the judge ask the kid what they were pleading for, and asked if they were in school, and they were, and then he carefully explained that he was going to suspend the hearing, and the kid should not pay a fine this time unless found guilty again.
I could see the dads visibly relax, both times, and the kid look stoic, and the dads walk with their kids out, the weight of all that could have gone wrong gone and both families going on with their lives.
Anyway, I got up there and he nailed me, no breaks and I thought the fine was a tad high but it was for apparently a near-felony level of littering and that's that.
Point is, I'm old enough to not deserve or need "breaks". People have done right by me all my life and I've been lucky, and I continue to be very happy and lucky. I probably paid for part of those fines for those kids, and they got another chance. That's growing up.
Litterbug signing off
