Teach and Learn...

Is another’s blood on your hands the justified price of an argument lost? You’re born into a world of confusion and dispute and taught that an eye for an eye is the only way to obtain justice. By the time you’re 10 you’ve had vague examples of doing what’s right. You were punished for skipping school, maybe for telling a lie, but were you taught the ramifications of these actions? Were you sat down and given an explanation of the “why” you ought not to do what you were just beaten for? Without that explanation, you develop a philosophy without knowing it, that no explanation is needed or one isn’t entitled.
Now you’re a teenager, considered a man in your house probably. Mainly because there is no other to challenge the status and it’s easier to pass on that role rather than continue to try and mold you into a respectful human being. Respectful to yourself and of others. You feel the world owes you something and because no explanation is given, you believe this with every fiber of your ignorant being. You walk outside your door with a chip as big as Texas and California put together all because you’ve been brain-washed into believing you are something and someone to be feared. You walk down your block sneering at your neighbors. The same neighbors that donated boxes of Fruit Loops to your grandmother’s church so that you and younger brother and sister would have breakfast. You flip off the owner of the corner store, the same man that gave you your first popsicle, because your mother didn’t have the money to buy it. As you make your way to your boy’s house, you laugh at the special needs boy across the street. The same boy that at one time shared his formula with you when you were babies because again, your mother didn’t have the money to buy any.
And while you’re on your way to begin another destructive, non-productive evening, your mother sits in the house once owned by your great-grandparents, and grandparents thereafter, trying to figure out who she can call to watch your younger brother and sister so that she can go out. She’s oblivious the damage she’s allowed to fester within you. Is she to blame? Partly. Will she ever know this? Perhaps. Does she care? No one will ever know, but maybe there’s a chance of seeing some concern when and if she begins to speak LIFE into you. In the meantime, you continue down your disruptive path terrorizing just about everyone that passes by.
And now, you’ve hyped yourself up to believe you’re all that and damn anybody that argues against it. With that attitude, you have a gun, a knife. With that attitude you have no regard for life. Your respect is some warped idea of a street code that’s been branded into your brain like the alphabet and by any means necessary, you’ll guard it.
Your boys? They’re all mock ups of what you’re trying to be. None of them have been instilled with the courage of becoming fruitful. Fruitful in the way of contributing positive attributes to society and the fellow man. Your idea of fruitful if the idea even enters your mind, is reproducing. Laying down with some girl that hasn’t been nurtured in the way you should’ve been. A young princess that believes her existence consists of being your girlfriend. The two of you will make a baby, and teach it the pathetic values you’ve come to live by on the Block. And thus the cycle continues.
Where does it end? How can it be prevented? Not being a parent, but of the human race, it begins and ends with concerned Adults. People willing to risk being cussed out for trying to encourage instead of degrading. Teachers who are passionate about guiding our young people to a prosperous future instead of down the hall to the principle’s office just to get them out of their classroom. It’s time to take the blinders off and look around. Just because they’re not biologically your kids, their behavior affects you just the same. It’s like a carefully set domino display, the minute that Child, yes, Child walks out the door, his/her actions become a part of your world. Like it or not.
Ignorance begets ignorance. When will we learn?