Learning the Rules of the Streets

Today I have been blessed to voice my opinion and tell the world exactly how it is.

People think that it’s cool to walk the streets fighting for literally no reason, and in some cases going to the extreme of even killing one another.

Yea I’m guilty of fighting, but you know what, I’ve learned my lesson the hard way.

Now as a young adult, I can admit that I was a hypocrite. I never had a problem with fighting until I was the one hurting.

People today walk around with black eyes and cuts going across their face from ear to ear, just because they looked at you wrong, or just because they felt like it.

Killers, trouble makers listen up…you think its cool but I’m here to tell you that it’s not and it’s nothing to be proud of. It won’t be funny when it’s you walking around with the black eye, with the buck fifty going across your face, or even worse you’re six feet under the ground… dead.

I live in a community where people have to put a front on just to make it through the day. If not they become the victims.

I remember the day like it was yesterday, May 6, 2008. It was the day that I became the victim. I thought that I could handle myself but it turns out I couldn’t.

I had a fight with a student from my school. For me going into the fight, I thought it would be like any other fight and we would just shoot a fair one…

Where I come from the term “shoot a fair one,” means we’re gonna fight one on one; no one jumps in, no weapons.

But like with any rules, they get broken. And on the day this rule was broken I learned a valuable lessons about how unfair these streets really are.

There I was just standing in the train station with my older sister and my cousin. My enemy was standing across from me with about 15 to 20 girls.

I watched her as she jumped over the turnstile and one after the other her friends followed her over.

She was trying every way possible to hit me but my sister wouldn’t let her. No matter how hard my sister tried to keep her away from me, there were too many girls and she finally got close enough to take a swing at me.

But before she could hit me I hit her first. I knew from that moment on, this was going to be a never ending war.

We began to fight and it was crazy. It was punch after punch going straight for each others faces and before I knew it, I was tripped. When I looked up I was being cut in my eye with a box cutter.

At that moment I felt upset, betrayed, and most of all disappointed.

I was upset because I didn’t deserve to get cut. Betrayed because the person who tripped me was my own friend. Disappointed because I should’ve been the bigger person and just walked away before things got out of hand.

I wish I could’ve been smarter about the situation.

Now, all I could do was cry.

This was the first time I couldn’t face reality and didn’t know what else to do.... where or who to run to.

I just wanted to shut down but I couldn’t allow myself to because nowadays we’re living by a set of rules we didn’t create, a set of rules we don’t want…but a set of rules we all have to follow.

So now I ask you, how do we begin to change the rules?

- Written by Veronica