I’m tooling up I-81 in New York, going from Binghamton to Schenectady. Moderate traffic, speed limit 70, but as the old saying goes, I keep pace with traffic….which is closer to 80. My rule has always been to hang in the right lane, change only to get by trucks and old granddads in their Ford wagons. Several cars buzz by me on the left.
Then suddenly a trooper comes up behind, turns on his lights. My first act is to look down, yep, 77. I pull over, and while Sgt Do-Right calls my tags in, straightens his gig line and puts on his Mounties hat, I rummage through the glove box for my papers.
Sarge walks up, bends down and peers in, and I roll down the window. The first words out of my mouth are, “What was wrong with all those other guys?”, pointing to all the Millennium Falcons jumping into hyper-space whizzing by.
“You were driving 78 in a 70 mph speed zone, sir.”
Oh, well. A Georgia cop would have smiled, and said, “This just ain’tchore lucky day, is it?”
Which would have been true enough when you stop and think about it. The Chinese would have said “Bad joss.” Or “The stars are not with you today.”
Fatalism, sheer chance, probably provides more answers than we want to admit, but still, we have to come up with a causation as to why Sgt Do-Right selected my car out of at least two dozen equally guilty speeders.
Was it the color of my car? Or was it the color of my skin? (These days white skin offends almost as much as every black man who was ever pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike will swear to.) More likely it was the color of my license plate, Virginia-white instead of New York gold.
Enough said. That was probably it, and common sensical enough my anger left me within an hour.
But consider Kimba Wood, current Senior District Judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Kimba for the position of Attorney General. But like Clinton’s preceding nominee, Zoe Baird, Kimba had hired illegal aliens to help around the house and watch the children. Nomination withdrawn. Clinton couldn’t risk a dust-up the hearings.
There you have it, just like that poor white guy tooling up the road to Schenectady, everybody up and down the avenue hired illegals to do all sorts of things around the house. It was a very New York thing to do, great price, great service, and never a worry about finding any of the silverware missing, for Consuela would know that would mean the first bus back to Nogales.
“Why me?”, I’m sure Kimba moaned, as she threw down her third Manhattan.
Only she could never completely rationalize it, as I was able to on I-81. I had broken the speed limit, and knew it. Kimba could never go that far. Cheap household help was a perquisite for being who she was. Her rank.
She broke no law.
So, for 25 years she’s carried around this chip on her shoulder, a chip good ol-boy C-students like me never wore since we had common sense enough to know we’d been caught.
Because she failed the “birthright” section on her civics test the first time she may find out that attorney-client privilege outranks her own self-identification with privilege.
She may yet get caught again
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