yea, but the community still has issues, and black people have a lost sense of community,...
i'm glad you 40+ and got money n shit... but it's niggaz who still in the hood just getting into all this shit.....
community heroes still matter
Got money??? You mean
HAD money. My money ain't been right in years. You remember the thread I did back on the IC about buying a sports car?
https://allhiphop.vanillaforums.com...hit-that-age-where-a-sports-car-is-inevitable
I was dead as fuck serious. So serious I had a cat ready to sell me his jet black 1992 Ferrari 348 TS until another dude came along and offered him more money... In cash.
I've touched on my family's situation a bit in the past but I never really went hard into the details but back in 2013 my money was back on point after two years of some bullshit. We just got into a nice ass 3000 sq/ft crib with a T-shaped pool in the back (the house was shaped like a squared off "U"), I had just bought my wife the Benz we had, I had two minivans in the driveway and was sittin off at a job making 6 figures again. I got laid off from that job in early 2014 and after the severance money and savings ran out we lost
everyfuckingthing. We filed for Ch 13 bankruptcy. Lost both of my vans, a year later the Benz got repo'd the day after my birthday so we were car-less. By mid-2014 we had to move our family of 6 from a plush ass crib to a 2 bedroom weekly in the hood and was gettin' food stamps until the end of the year. I started working for myself because I couldn't land another job for shit and that first year doing it I managed to squeeze out just short of 60K. In mid 2015 I was able to get my family out of that weekly and into a house, but even that house was in the hood. We made the best of it but my money still wasn't right. At the end of 2016 we filed for Ch7 and ended up moving from that house back into that same weekly in the same fuckin apartment the day after Christmas. I mean, shit... I ended up selling off my production equipment to make ends meet. I still haven't copped it again.
We finally moved out after a year and a week into the house we're in now. It's on the other side of the city, far from the hood. My money still ain't right, but it's better and a little more stable. I've seen the hood in recent years because up to the end of last year I was living in it. I've seen all the problems and issues, especially where I was at. I could walk outside of my building and across the street were abandoned buildings where squatters set up camp. Homeless niggas literally sleeping on the sidewalk out in the open in broad daylight. The 7-11 around the block had a homeless settlement in the alley behind it. Addicts walking around high as fuck on the regular. The cops staged a drug raid on the nigga in the apartment directly next door to us complete with an army of SWAT officers, explosives to blow the door, flash bang grenades, shotgun blasts, and all manner of shit. Apparently if there was a drug you were looking for, he had it and was a major supplier of it in the area. There were fights in the building almost daily. A week or so before we found the house we're in now, the cops had the entire building surrounded with squad cars early as fuck in the morning. There were several DV incidents popping off all at once like niggas lost their goddamned minds collectively. Days before there was a fight in the courtyard that involved 4 apartments. Cops stayed coming to the building and it was nothing to see the ghetto bird lights shining all over the place at night.
And even through all of it, I was still trying to put niggas on to some different shit. The problem? Niggas wasn't trying to hear it. Living on food stamps, welfare, and section 8 was like a goddamned godsend as far as they were concerned. There were families that had been there, in that weekly, for upwards of 9 years. I saw people with no desire to get out of that rut. I couldn't find a single soul willing to step out of that comfort zone and give some other shit a try. Just even some little shit like UI testing that you can do in your spare time nobody was fuckin with it. Not because they didn't have a computer, but because they just didn't want to do it. My stepfather put in 50+ years of his life trying to help the same type of people and now that he's retired as the director of the community action group he led for 40 years and I think he's finally at the point where he's seeing what I've been seeing lately:
Niggas in the hood really don't want to be helped. They're satisfied with living in the hood and everything that comes along with that.
At this point in my life, fantasy is welcome.