Can Photographers Stop Hating Tripods, Please?

For most of my life as a photographer here in NYC, I've been told to never have a tripod around. The reason: It's illegal to have a tripod in public unless you have a permit to do so. And that's how photographers have been making images for years without them. We, photographers, helped make the public and the law think of tripods as the #1 enemy -- that when they went down on the ground, we were already professional photographers making images. The make up artists, lights, and all that other stuff was ignored. Indeed, the industry did to tripods what the American Health industry did to fats when the real problem was sugar.