Before my day's writing fully reaches its whole body I ask that you excuse any miss punctuation. Although intelligent and educated, I am still at my core very much still street...
Good morning to all F.R.O supporters and associates. Today I want to open the Minds, Hearts, Eyes, and the Souls that of which carries them all to step inside of the closed realm of obtaining true Understanding. I welcome you to invite yourself to accept pure awareness that feels uncomfortable and forces you to acknowledge the truth about how our today's youth are being Incarcerated, Murdered, Abandoned, Forgotten, Mislead and Misinformed.
Where does the real work begin? I sit here staring outside the Windows of my soul, thinking to myself, "Tonight there's going to be more bloodshed from the edges of the Pacific to the Atlantic. Nobody of true prestige, power, or position seems to care about that fact. Time isn't healing anything within a system that doesn't even know how to Rehabilitate the already lost souls that it stores in captivity."
Our so-called "community leaders" who wear authoritarian titles and dress in these fancy suits and sit behind these desks overlooking society as it struggles and destroys itself because it has no structure. You mean to tell me you expect a 12 year old boy who's mother is either Strung out on drugs, Prostituting on the streets, Gangbanging Herself, or already incarcerated as a result of the circumstances and trauma that life provider her to be able to see different?
How, when he's probably never known his father, and if he does know his father, he too has been incarcerated longer than he's been alive as a result of life's circumstances. He's more than likely grown up in low-income housing (Project housing), probably lived place to place, never been shown or given true love, and maybe even watched his older brother that he looked up to be slain in the very same streets he embraced as his safe-haven.
Without this youth being able to relate to their community leaders, as some of us here representing F.R.O once couldn't during our generations time, you cannot realistically expect him to take today's community leaders serious when he cannot even relate to them! To even be open-minded or willing to believe there's light anywhere in the tunnel when all he sees is chaos. How does he even possess the ability to take education seriously in hopes to be someone of professional status, when the only professionals he knows are the ones selling dope, pimping women, gang banging to survive, or even worse: driving around in vehicles that wear slogans stating "Protect & Serve" but they too are just another fashion of a gang who legally possess a license to kill Black Men and Black Women everyday.
Then, you wake up to only visualize them in the midst of their wrong, being praised on the 6 A.M. News for doing what he's hearing he has no right to do. When a rival 13 year old boy just unloaded 50 rounds into his already destroyed home, how can we be realistic and honest with ourselves to expect him to ever value another persons life? He doesn't even have the tools to do so, let alone know how to value his own. We need to stop having discussions about these issues and start working these issues. Enough conversation has been had! Funding has allegedly been allocated, but no construction or reconstruction in the community has been done.
In the year of 2021 a number of social groups for culturally appropriate re-entry services and rerooting programming, received funding from Seattle Human Services Department which was distributed through The City Of Seattle General Fund. This sum came in the amount of 1,383,000 and this funding was supposed to have been distributed to the currently and formerly incarcerated individuals to do the very work needed to be done that I symbolically speak of here today; however, the only appropriate re-entry services and rerooting programming fronts receiving this funding are those who were formerly incarcerated.
All the while, the currently incarcerated who are doing this very same work under more strained circumstances seem to be forgotten, and the established groups receive no aid. How does this change without us being wrapped inside the bubble as monetary gain? When do we become part of not just the knowledge and information, but part of the recognition because our experience has provided understanding for the solution?
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