Am I Part Of This World?

Have you ever wondered if you wanna be part of this world anymore?

What I mean by that is, have you ever felt like keeping to yourself and your family; only concerning yourself with your work and leisure. This would embody itself these days as someone who wasn't really concerned with Occupy Wall Street, not really keeping up with the unjust massacre in Libya at the hands of Obama, and not really worried about the social programs in your community, volunteering, giving back, etc.

The reason I ask is, my mother has come to the conclusion, now in her later life, that she doesn't want to be an active member of the world anymore. Her biggest worries are her soaps, her income, and to a degree her children. When I questioned her about this, she concluded a few things about how I live me life in her answer. She told me, I shouldn't worry so much about my friends, cause they would never worry that much about me, and that I was wasting my time trying to help others, when I had trouble helping myself in other areas. Essentially, “No one ever gave me anything, if anything they made my life harder, so I'm done 'giving back'”. Granted, she makes a really good point- people friggin suck.

This left me wondering, and feeling kinda fatalistic about my life up until this point. This lead me to wonder, if I really wanted to care anymore? While going into my old bedroom, I happened upon a photo album accidentally while searching for a pillow. In it I found some letters that had been given to me during a really troubling time in my life. I will post some captions from the creative cards that were given to me by this teacher. She had been a student teacher somewhere in the school when I was in grade five and I took a really strong liking to her.

“Thank you for the flower! You brightened my day! You are so special.
Your friend, Mrs. Woods”

“You are so wonderful! Thank you for the chocolate and wine gums- all my

favourites! You have been such a good friend to me and brought me joy and

encouragement. You are a very special person and I think you will find some nice friends in middle school. I am glad to have met you. And I will not forget you. You are the best!

♥ Mrs. Woods”

These words came and a really hard time in my life; the beatings at home were getting more intense as I got older, and I was supremely depressed. I was also being bullied heavily and could find no way to get my wardrobe to please the other children. No one had ever appreciated me, or ever believed that I could be more than a punching bag. This was the first person to really tell me the truth about myself, and I believed her. She didn't need to do that for me, and I am ETERNALLY grateful for the many other cards like this that she had made just for me. For the first time, I was proud of myself.

Finding these again really struck a cord in my fatalistic thinking. Just because people have not cared for us, doesn't justify us not caring for others. If we are all never going to give back to our communities, how do we expect things to grow? Do we just never change and all become individualistic? It's not a really strong justification for denying a service to someone that you can provide.

On a wider world scale, I'm going to use the example of my Hero, the late Malcolm X. Can you imagine a black man growing up in 20's? His father was assassinated by the KKK, and his mother soon after was institutionalized because of the stress of being a homeless single mother caused her to crack. Malcolm was then separated from his siblings and put in foster care where his education was neglected. Even though he was an exceptional student his teacher encouraged him to become a carpenter, cause simply put, “black folk” just didn't do the same kinda jobs as “white folk”. He then turned to drugs, and hustling. He was a brilliant mind, even as a hustler and managed to evade the law all the way till his 20's. He was then granted 10 years in prison, not so much because of the robbery he was caught for, but more so because he'd been sleeping with a married white woman.

Now at this point in his life, almost illiterate, poor, abused, and off to prison for 10 years. What had the world really given to Malcolm? Not much!

And yet, this man changed the face of America drastically, and altered the history of blacks, and Muslims, on this continent. Working with Martin Luther King, and the like, in his later(and wiser) years, he managed to propelling the civil rights movement in a drastic way. After leaving the sect of Islam and accepting traditional Islam he saw that there was a serious political problem presenting his people. He then spear headed the movement of taking the gruesome abuse of America on blacks to the United Nations; a revolutionary move. No one had ever considered that blacks deserved human rights up until then, and not many were educating other Afro-Americans that it was OKAY to even be -black-.

Although Malcolm had to overcome intense obstacles, such as drug withdraw, teaching himself how to read and write on his own, educating himself about the world around him, and how his people even became slaves.

Simply put, no one ever gave this man anything, and yet he gave his life (literally, he was assassinated at the age of 39.) for his people, and contributed greatly to the world around us, and civil rights, human rights, human FREEDOMS.

Frankly, I wouldn't want to know what the world would be like if he, and MANY other -soldiers- like him (Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, etc.) had been so exceptionally -selfish- to only want to be concerned with themselves.

So I implore you. Give back. Love. Help. Grow. Change this world. No one else is going to do it for us!