All of us can probably point to one or two defining moments in our life. Mine came when I was running across a rooftop with a gun pointed at my back. Something inside me snapped and I just knew I didn't want this to be my life. I stopped running.
I grew up on the streets of the city. Each neighborhood has its culture and so did mine. Ours included playing skellie with your friends while your older brother is twenty feet away on the street corner selling crack or weed, or heroin.
Do you know what hustling is in the ghetto? It's simply the American Dream for us. You see we're not so different. We all want the same things. Everyone wants respect. Everyone wants a home for their family. Everyone wants to prove themselves; it's just that in New York's poor neighborhoods the only thing young people see that can get them ahead is hustling.
As a young boy I watched my older brother and his friends climb the ladder of ghetto success. First we saw them deal weed. Then we saw them move up to crack. We saw people treat them with respect. We saw their expensive clothes and hot cars. We saw them give people money when they needed it to survive. They were our heroes. This was our definition of a hero, and if you heard something else in school, it didn't matter. It mattered what you saw. What you experienced.
I started hustling at 16 and I started getting into trouble. It was around this time that I met Rob Geis from...
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...e street culture.
Antwone left five children. James left two. Seven children that I want to be a role model for. Seven children that represent tens of thousands more that need to see that there is life outside of this neighborhood prison.
An alienated person is a dangerous person. If they don't destroy themselves, they will destroy others. We have to stop the isolation that overwhelms young men and women, particularly young African-American boys and girls, in our worst neighborhoods, I ask you, the next time you find yourself in a bad area and you see a kid hanging out, maybe he's wearing a du-rag and baggy pants, please don't just be afraid for yourself, be afraid for him too. His chances are not good.
Throughout the article “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson explains the differences between “decent” and “street” people that can be applied to the approaches of social control, labeling, and social conflict theories when talking about the violence among inner cities due to cultural adaptations.
Generally when you think of a hero, who do you envision? Most likely, you picture a strong and imposeing figure, someone capable of performing in high pressure situations, demonstrating bravery and passion to help his/her fellow man. Those who typically fit that role in society are firefighters, policemen, and soldiers. Those people deserve all the credit and recognition they receive for their courageous acts. However, what about individuals or groups who aren’t necessarily on the “frontlines” physically protecting others and saving lives, but who work extremely hard to improve the lives of others in some way? These everyday people deserve credit as well. After all, to the people they help, these volunteers or activists are heroes. An example of such a group is the Greensboro Four, a few African American college students in the early 1960s who helped change the landscape of segregation in the Jim Crow South.
Everyone has had that one moment, or maybe a couple. The moment when their life changes forever, the moments when they know they will never be the same person they were yesterday. These moments are turning points that play a large role in a person’s identity.
The narrator in Raymond Carver’s "Cathedral" is not a particularly sensitive man. I might describe him as self-centered, superficial, and egotistical. And while his actions certainly speak to these points, it is his misunderstanding of the people and the relationships presented to him in this story which show most clearly his tragic flaw: while Robert is physically blind, it is the narrator who cannot clearly see the world around him.
In Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral” the narrator learns what it means to “see” through someone who cannot. To see is to be able to view the things around us while putting aside preconceived notions or fear about these objects or people. In order for this to occur once must overcome what they feel is out of the ordinary and learn to accept things as they are. At first the narrator is doesn’t accept the man and uncomfortable around Robert. The narrator soon comes to understand this when he puts aside his fears, and judgments that he can see more than what meets the eye, and the freedom that comes along with this seeing.
In Raymond Carver’s story, “Cathedral,” the story tells of how a close outside relationship can threaten a marriage by provoking insecurities, aggravating communication barriers, and creating feelings of invasion of privacy. The husband in the story is given the gift of seeing the cathedral through a blind man’s eyes. Although the title suggests that the story is about a cathedral, it is really about two men who come together and share a vision and realize it is he who is blind.
When most people think of blind people, they tend to picture a person with dark sunglasses, a seeing eye dog, and a walking stick. These are stereotypes and obviously do not remain true in the case of all blind people. In Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral," the main character is jealous and judgmental of his wife’s friend who happens to be a blind man. It is the combination of these attitudes that leads to his own unique “blindness." It is through this initial blindness, that the character gains his greatest vision.
When a child is growing up he is frequently asked what he is going to do for money when he gets older. The more this question is asked to them, the more they feel like they have to have money to be happy in life. After many tries of trying to make a stable life at a low paying job, a criminal life maybe more appealing to them at they may start living life under the gun. As stated by William Wilson in When Work Disappears, “Neighborhoods plagued by high levels of joblessness are more likely to experience low levels of social organization, they go hand in hand.” In Chicago for instance, in 1990 there was only one in three in the twelve ghetto communities that had held a job in a typical workweek of the year. When there are high rates of joblessness bigger problems surface such as violent crime, gang violence, and drug trafficking. (Wilson P356-362)
The unnamed narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” poses as an unreliable narrator for his unaccepting nature towards blind people along with his ignorant perception of many realities in his life that Carver presents for the reader to take into question. The narrator holds prejudice against Robert, a blind man whom the narrator’s wife worked with ten years earlier and eventually befriends. Unperceptive to many of the actualities in his own life, the narrator paints an inaccurate picture of Robert that he will soon find to be far from the truth.
Many people view blindness as a disability, but could these people be blind to their surroundings? Even though the narrator can perfectly see with his eyes, he lacks in understanding awareness. The narrator blindness isn 't physical, like many vision impaired people. His blindness is psychological, and his blindness causes him to become jealous. His blindness blocks his perception of viewing the world in a different way. This only causes him to see the physical attributes of humans, and thus shut off his mindfulness of viewing human personalities. As a result of a closed mind, the narrator doesn 't understand how Robert was able to live with the fact that he was never able to see his wife in the flesh, but the narrator fails to see that Robert vision of his wife was intimate. On the other hand, Robert blindness is physical. This causes Robert to experience the world in a unique manner. Without Robert eyesight, he is able to have a glimpse of a human personality. He uses his disability to paint pictures in his head to experience the world. By putting his psychological blindness aside, the narrator is able to bond with Robert, and he grasps the understanding of opening his eyes for the first time, and this forms a new beginning of a
Through a blind man, both the reader and the narrator of Cathedral discover how merely looking with your eyes and really seeing are two very different things. The blind man, Robert, though not able to physically see, has a more detailed and more understanding view of the world than the narrator does. This narrator, whom we know only as the nameless husband, views life in a shallow, superficial way. As the story goes on, it becomes clear who has the more comprehensible vision of life and of the world.
There is another type of hero that almost no one is aware of. In the poorest areas of the country, live mostly minorities and other ethic background. All their lives they’ve been expected to work harder and expected not succeed in life. Some individuals living in poverty with a determination to succeed work hard all of their lives to become what everybody doubted they could. Escaping the crime, drugs, and prostitution is enough to escape hell, even if they don’t go to college. Despite of their financial problems, drug and crime surroundings, or difficulties in the language skills, their desire to triumph fuels their persistence. Those who make it to success are the few living examples of the purest form of hero anyone can be. They are not only their own heroes but also the heroes of the poor children who dream of becoming like them someday.
In response to the bloody battles of World War I, the Theatre of the Absurd was born. Soldiers surrounded by death and destruction often found no other relief but to laugh at the absurdity of noble, but increasingly meaningless traditional rhetoric and patriotism. This laughter was a response to not only the absurdity of their situation, but also to the absurd responses of others to their situation. Out of this response grew what we know today as the Theatre of the Absurd. A classic example of a work from the Absurdist Theatre is a piece known as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In this work, John Stoppard uses allusion to T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and Shakespeare's Hamlet to help the audience understand the play.
An Event which changed my life, well when, I think back on my life there’s
I was in my final year at high-school. I was only seventeen and the pressure of knowing that the outcome of school results would determine my whole life ahead finally got to me. I snapped. One day, in the absence of my parents, I ran away from home, hoping never to return.