A lot of people ask me, “Why do I do what I do, the way I do?” I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in one of the worst neighborhoods in America, in one of the worst times in the country’s gang history. In my neighborhood just like a lot of other neighborhoods around the world, it was plagued with violence and drugs. Where I grew up 75% of the males believe that there is one way to make money and that’s trapping or as you would say selling drugs. When it comes to gangs, If your hood bangs and you hang out, you are visible to other hoods, so you might as well bang cause you affiliated, so we bang. If you a male in hoods like mines you either trapping, robbing, stealing, murking for money, or you broke. It’s the same for the women, 75% of the females either on welfare, boosting (stealing clothes), trapping or looking for a dude with money to support them, and that’s how it go. Our mindset is, “this is where I am, my momma a drunk or smoked out, my daddy was this so that’s what I’m gone be, all my family in the street get it like this, my whole hood live this way, I have to do what I have to do, this is life.” You add this onto the back of a sixteen year old that just had a baby, everyday he comes in the house there is no food, a house full of crack heads, and you get what you see in the inner cities around the world, "Survivors!" This life that we live is made to look cool, by the media, movies, magazines, documentaries, and of course, music. Most rappers you hear today spitting gangsta are “Fake thugs, point blank period!” They have never touched a gram of dope, never banged a ratchet (a gun), and have never even been hood at all, never! Every now and then you get a couple of them that really are hood, when they come out talking about hood life, the struggle of it, the drive of wanting to get out by any means necessary, they become our voice because their story is our story and therefore it becomes the soundtrack to our life. When your hear a dude talking about your struggle and you see him come up out of it, you think that can work for you and even if it don’t, the pressure that comes along with the life we live will make you try it because anything is better than this. I don’t condone anyone selling drugs, stealing, killing, robbing or any crime, but I do understand the mindset of the people that do it for survival. I’ve been in the situation where my kids didn’t have any where to stay, no family to help and thinking from a hood mindset, I would have murked the world to feed my babies. I understand the young boy that wants to be a man and provide for his family so bad that he would rob to do it. I understand that he only uses the things that he knows and I spit to give him hope that there is another way to live. "Thats why I do what i do." One day I was awakened to the fact that the way i was living was all a lie! Everything that my hood, music and movies told me was not what i was born to be, I wasn’t born to be a goon, killer or murderer. I was awakened to the fact that females were not made to be toys of my sexual pleasure. They were not part time conversations or trashcans for me to dump my hurts and emotions. I learned that God made them, as well as myself, and that God had a purpose in mind for me and them. In the hood we are some of the most religious, hypocritical people I have ever seen. We have what my friends and I call “Hood Theology.” We know God exist, we say we love God, we pray, we may even go to church, but we think God is cool with everything we do. I know I been there. I’m in the back of the police car cuffed up, I’m like, “ God get me out of this please I will never do it again.” Soon as I’m out the car I’m right back at it again. I’m stupid high riding in the car, like, “man God please don’t let me crash, I’m done getting blowed.” Soon as I wake up the next day I’m right back at it again. Faced down in the trap house by the police, guns in my face, guns busting at me, shot up in the hospital almost dead, locked up on felonies and get out messing with nasty girls. What ever the case is, we see that the grace of God. that same grace gets us out of trouble time and time again and we go right back to what we do, because God keeps showing us grace and we think it means He’s cool with what we live. That’s what I thought to, because God kept showing me grace in my (most I just named) situations I thought God was cool with how I was living, but he wasn’t, and if you living that way He is not cool with it either. The truth is this;

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