There were no thoughts as my small, weak fourth grade fist crashed nicely onto the skull of the bleeding fifth grader lying below me. The floor and my face were equally covered in an odd mix of my own tears, mucus, the dirt and pebbles of our surrounding elementary school. I was a mere nine years of age, swinging my small hands as if in a frenzy, like a hostile Chihuahua, eyes bulging, and small heart beating as if fighting its own miniature war, clawing way for its very last breath.
In my part of California, children fighting each other seems typical. We the inhabitants are deemed barbaric; we are looked upon even by our own political leaders and protectors as pitiful beings, unable to think logically. They never once take into account that sometimes the most beautiful flowers are born unto the darkest of spaces. But this “hood,” this “barrio,” this “ghetto,” has always been and is home to me. The angels of what was once known as South Central Los Angeles have protected me for nearly my entire life.
In my Los Angeles elementary school, on the day my fourth grade self fought, it was not an act of senseless childlike violence. It was solely to protect one smaller and younger than I. I could no longer stand the verbal punishment being inflicted on Benjamin, my brother, without even so much as a provocation and though, I must confess violence should not have been, my first choice of action, I stood up--both literally and mentally--and pursued a cease to the mistreatment of my own “flesh and blood.”
Even at that early age, I had already the kindling spark within me; I had the feeling that it was my duty to protect him. The streets of Los Angeles had not given me a raging crack addiction, nor any alcoholic tendencies, nor have they given me exclusive membership into the most criminally active gangs, nor have they equipped me with gun or knife. As a child playing outside with friends, as a young student walking both himself and his younger brother to school oblivious and unaware of the dangers in their surroundings, as a teenager riding bus after bus going home from school, I have gained instead from my beloved city the understanding that as humans we must protect our brothers and sisters worldwide to not turn ourselves away from suffering for the hope of not ever acknowledging its existence but instead forcing ourselves to struggle and suffer ourselves, in order to bring about any form of aid available. I have the understanding that though I have been born into poverty it does not mean I cannot live; I do not fear poverty, for I have something greater than money, I know I can live happily without it, I have a passion that burns hotter than any two stars in the universe combined burning inside of me, a genuine yearning for knowledge. This is what has motivated me to wake every single school day at no later than 5:30 in the morning to get to a school miles away in a completely different city, it is what motivated my conscious decision to stay away from a life lived behind the barrel of a 9mm handgun and a double edged blade. This urban “ghetto” has shaped me, crushed me, and reformed me for the better; I have the ability to create change even only as one single human being.