I’ve always felt one of the biggest benefits this job will ever provide me, is perspective.

It’s easy enough in our daily lives to lose sight of the ‘big picture’…to get caught up in our own world, ignorant to the daily dealings of a great majority of the general public.

This past week, was one of those friendly reminders.

It started at the White House, a spot certainly more in-tune with my regular beat of stories. I was there covering the President’s 2^nd prime-time news conference since his election. We were escorted in to the East Room, sat in our assigned seats and finally, listened to President Obama wax poetic about topics ranging from swine flu (the first concern he voiced) to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. At such events, it’s hard not to breathe in an air of importance and worth…thinking that you’re part of a world in which each word is pivotal, each action, with its own set of massively impacting results.

But two days later…bam! There’s that perspective I was talking about. That great equalizer.  

The courthouse in Upper Marlboro is as true a slice of life as it gets. Inside the large governmental looking building are throngs of people with limitless problems to face.

I was there covering the story of a man who’d used a dating-social service to meet a woman, only then to be conned into giving her and another man posing to be a bounty hunter $20,000. A crazy story you can watch below:

http://cfc.wjla.com/videoondemand.cfm?id=39412

While waiting though for the tale to unravel…I was watching mini-dramas play out of me like they were coming off of an assembly line.

-a Mexican, illegal immigrant pleading guilty to using a sledge hammer to break into a business at night looking for money (he’ll be deported)

-a 21 year old busted for selling crack-cocaine to an undercover cop

-another young man busted for selling drugs

-and most depressing, a man who looked barely beyond his teenage years, appearing before the judge while clutching a baby to his chest

“Where’s the baby’s mama?” asked the judge.

“She’s working,” he said glumly as he pleaded guilty to unauthorized use of a car. (cases like that often mean temporarily stealing a car from a friend or relative)

“At least someone’s working” replied the judge trying to sound positive.

Watching him, baby faced, and with his crying baby between he and the judge stand alongside attorney and ask for probation, rather than prison time was sobering and sad.

It was dejecting…wondering if the child (less than a year old) stands a chance in this world. Will he decades from now appear in this very courtroom as part of the vicious cycle or will he defy odds and take a more admirable path than the scores of defendants who sat on either side of his father, awaiting their fates?

Of course, there’s no way of knowing this just yet. But there is an immediate takeaway. The perspective, that ‘equalizer’, the gut check that reminds you that not a half-hour from the White House, sits the courthouse….and a world, many of us choose to forget, or have never known.