[REPORT]John Hohenberg, “The Professional Journalist” Joseph Lariosa, “Pinoy Pulitzer winner fined $378 for driving without license”

People are already sleeping in the urban, as well as in rural areas. Most establishments are starting to close. The sky’s color is at its peak. You can lie in the middle of highways. Only few people are awake, staring at no particular scenery outside their window, gulping their 7th cup of coffee. They can’t sleep, because in their hands lies the gravity of tomorrow. Literally.

In the middle of a night, as the world is sleeping, few people are fighting the urge to close their eyes, bounded by the huge responsibility to be the story tellers of history, bounded by the huge responsibility to take a lot of care their license, their credibility.

Ironically, credibility and its twin brother, honesty are not taught in school. They are not included in any course syllabus or curriculum. They are acquired by years of experience, and the natural-born urge to serve. As the years of experience is unfolding, also the years of struggle to fight off temptations like corruption and masking the truth for material gain.

But credibility and honesty once again proved their might as Filipino Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist-turned-immigration rights crusader Jose Antonio Vargas was fined $378 last October 5 after pleading guilty to driving without a valid license during his pre-trial before Judge Marilyn Kaman of the 4th Judicial District of Hennepin County in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
According to Nancy Peters, Public Affairs-Communications Specialist of the Minnesota Fourth Judicial District, Vargas “pled guilty to driving without a valid driver’s license and paid the petty misdemeanor fine of $378. His attorney signed the fine payment slip.”
The 31-year-old Vargas was driving he was stopped by a Minneapolis State Patrol officer, who ticketed him for driving without valid license.

In his essay in the New York Times, Vargas said he obtained a driver’s license in Washington State in 2011 after his Oregon license expired.

“Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington.”

“The license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable identification – but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am.”

It was reported that Vargas’ driver’s license was revoked by Washington state but Vargas did not surrender his driver’s license.
In his tell-all article in the New York Times last June 2011, Vargas outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in the US he was 12 years old when his parents sent him to the US to live with his grandfather in California. Never in his whole life he imagined to become one of the 11.2 million illegal immigrants living in the US as of 2011( 270,000 of them are illegal immigrants from the Philippines).

Near the first anniversary of his outing last May in Chicago, he told a group that he had been on a speaking tour in 60 events in 20 states in 11 months after writing his first-person account in the New York Times Magazine on June 22, 2011.

And days after he and about 2,000 undocumented immigrants made the cover of Time magazine, President Barack Obama signed on to the new policy of Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security, allowing from 1.2 million up to 1.7 million undocumented young immigrants to apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). However, Antonio did not qualify for benefits under DACA, which only accepts 30-year-old applicants. He turned 31 last February.

Vargas, one of those people who fight off sleepiness and corruption, one of the story tellers of history, is not a demigod. He is a journalist