Teen Violence in the U.S.

The streets talking, are we listening? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey y'all, welcome back to Ring Your My Podcast with your girl Key, where I say what needs to be said. No filter, no fluff, just real talk. Y'all, I tried to go over to YouTube and do the live and you know get all glammed up and all that good freaky funky stuff, but that's just not me. I'm gonna keep it real, keep it 100, keep it a buck, whatever y'all say right now. I like it right here. You know, I like the studio, but I like my personal studio. I like not having to do a whole lot to be seen, but to be heard is more fulfilling to me. So this is where we are. Y'all gotta come over here and find me in an audio trap house if you want to hear what I got to say. I might pop in every now and then visually, and I might not. Who knows? But at the end of the day, you still gonna get the message. And the message today is teen violence in the US. That's the topic for today. Yeah, we are going there. This was prompted, and I'm not gonna hold you because I promise. I used to do like 45 minutes to an hour, but that became tasking as well. So um, I'm gonna try to keep these things 15-20 minutes because it don't take a whole lot to say what you got to say. I've been saying that since I've been a child. If you talk on the phone too long, run your mouth too long, you're probably gonna start telling a lie or you're gonna start babbling. So I don't want to do either. I want to keep it true, keep it real, and I don't want to get you so caught up in the fluff that you missed the message. But this this came about from recent violence that occurred in a town that I I once called my second hometown. Escaping my original hometown of Detroit to come to Georgia and and and raise kids and you know, set up foundation in a place that I once called a safe haven. It's become a bloodbath. And the town is compromised of maybe 9,000, maybe 10,000 people at the most. And it's it's constantly been on the news between the two neighboring towns of Osilla and Fitzgerald, Douglas, Tifton, Cordell, Wilcox, which is my mom and my dad's hometown, is also neighboring, but the crime rates there are not even as big anymore as these two um counties. So I read a post, um, and I'm gonna quickly I'm gonna read the post. And this this is what really prompted me to to come back and discuss this topic because it's a sensitive topic. Everything is sensitive um when it involves children, murder, uh, death, or tragedy, but it's especially sensitive when you know the people or you know of the area. It becomes very personal. So this was this was really kind of personal to me. Um, someone posted that let me see what he said. He talked about a snitch and um how so much crime has been rising in these areas, and people are afraid to talk about it. So I'm gonna read it word for word because it'll make sense. He said, before I get into this post, I'm gonna give y'all the definition of a snitch. I think the streets got the definition messed up. A snitch is a person that living that's living a criminal lifestyle and get caught and give the police information about another criminal to get less time for the crime they committed. A regular civilian that lives normal life isn't considered a snitch if they protecting their home, family, assets, and community, etc. With that being said, YNs, and we all know what that means, need to be held accountable for their actions and people in the community need to stop worrying about being labeled as a snitch when innocent kids being shot and killed. They need to be caught and made an example out of for their for the other Y-Ns. I'm telling you now, call me what you want. But I wouldn't, I would, if I ever witnessed a Y-N shooting in crowds and killing innocent people, I'm telling what I saw. I have a grandson that's going to grow up one day. Prayers for Osilla and the families down there. I hope someone gives the information needed to bring these Y-Ns to justice. I hope they give you 50 years with no parole and you drop soap. Okay, I'm gonna stop right there. Because um that was the part. They share everything on social media, and 12 sits back and watch them blame each other, get in their head, and nudge them to go to war with with their peers in their own neighborhoods when nobody ever snitched. Actually, they just told on themselves with their behavior. So one of his followers comes back and she goes, This starts at home. Mind you, this is a white lady. So she's discussing first and foremost something that's going on in the black communities that's been rising uh dramatically over the last decade, the violence in small towns and black communities. And she says, Um, it starts at home. You can't blame cops for anyone's poor decision making. Okay, that's where I came back and I asked her to read for with comprehension to understand because I never said that the cops was the blame. The cops are doing their job. Cops have always been able to solve cases, detectives have been able to solve cases by the help from community, bystanders, witnesses, and information from informants. So that's their job to sit back and watch people's page and see if they're gonna incriminate themselves. She didn't read, she didn't understand, and she can't empathize because one, she's a white lady, you're not in this neighborhood. These were not your children that was running for their lives and gunned down at this block party. So this is the third incident that has occurred in the last two years where um someone has died in that area by gun violence. Last year, around the same time in April, a young girl was killed at a prom party, after party in Fitzgerald. No one has been arrested. One person was arrested, but no one else has been charged or arrested. Then you had the year before that, or that same year after that, um, a boy was killed in Osilla. Not related to the prom, not related to the two, but gun violence. Um, then you have this, and I'm not saying, you know, oh, and we had the situation with 404 Day in Atlanta just this weekend, the wrong people. They're absolutely where they need to be. Now, as far as the the block party, there's some questions about whether or not there was enough security, whether or not it was approved properly, whether or not um the police had presence. But at this point, I don't really think if the police had presence if it ended at 11 o'clock or if it ended right after dust dawn. Kids are fighting in the middle of the day. They are shooting in the middle of the day. They don't care about the police being present, I don't think. I don't think that's really a big deal for them. Something else has got to trigger these kids. Um, all of those factors do matter. It matters that a person takes the initiative if they're gonna give something like this to make sure that there's proper security, there's a shutdown time, proper age rule, but let's be clear. When you're giving a block party or giving something outside, you have very little control over who's gonna walk up out of a backyard. It's very, very hard. You can get all the security in the world. It's gonna be very, very difficult to control that crowd. So that's something to keep in the back of your dome that it really kind of wouldn't have mattered if she had had security on every end of the street because it's so many outlets to be able to roam about the streets publicly in an outdoor event. That's just like at the park or anywhere else. Um, these things are bound to happen if we don't know the type of crowd that we're catering to. So let's be honest. The streets are talking, but are we really listening? Every time you scroll on your phone or turn on the news, or even just step outside, somebody's child is on a t-shirt, balloons being thrown up in the air. And at some point, we gotta stop acting surprised and start asking what is really going on. Not asking or saying, this will mess me up. This, this, this you messed the neighborhood up, you messed the community up. Of course they did. Of course the death messed you up. These kids ain't never gonna graduate. They will never ever see the light of day again. All over what? What are we really seeing right now? Let's just call it what it is. This ain't just kids being kids anymore. We're seeing teenagers out here fighting over social media posts, pulling up on each other over words. Words that they posted on social media, typefighting, carrying weapons like it's normal, pulling them out, recording, showing, brandishing guns and stores. This is where we at right now. And reacting without thinking about consequences. This, whoever these shooters were, they weren't thinking about who was in this in this street or whose houses these bullets could ricochet off of, who's on this block. These people on this block evidently were comfortable and okay with this um event taking place because a permit was issued. But did they think about the fact that people are in their homes minding their business while people are outside trying to enjoy a day? Where I come from, we always blocked, we would shut the whole block down, turn on the hot fire hydrant, put cones, and we didn't need the police presence because we took care of one another in our neighborhood. We had genuine fun cookouts, and this one, this is the murder capital of the world at one point, and we didn't feel unsafe in our own neighborhood. You should never feel unsafe in your own neighborhood. And that's what that's what's boggling to me. You know, you got these boys and the even the girls, and I'm not gonna call them Y-Ns or or I don't know what to call the girls bad bees, I guess, is what they're calling themselves. But I work in the in the in the system prior to where I'm at now. I've worked in the system for years, juvenile to adult. And you'll see black boys, black men and institutionalized and incarcerated, and they claim in their set. Okay, do what you do, that's fine. But then you got the Iranian nation and all these other sets, non-black sets that's taking over the jails and the prisons, and they'll be roommates, cellmates with them and won't touch them. But then you put them in the cellmate, in the cell with somebody that's another set of same color, same race, same creed, same struggle, and they won't they go to war. Now you it's a bloodbath. I don't get that. Like, where are we sitting in our mind as black men and black women in these teens where they don't understand that they came from the same struggle? The mud that they say they they got it, they got it out of, that's the bloody mud of your ancestors who came from the same struggle you did, boy, girl. You out here banging and and and fighting over territory that you do not own. You fight, you know, from where I come from, people have stuff at stake. You know, if you out here and you doing what you do, millions of dollars at stake. You got your family to protect, you got reasons to be on the defense. I don't understand how being at a party and everybody having fun with your classmates, your friends, probably your family in most of these small towns, what offends you so much that you feel like you need to pull out a gun and you need to start shooting innocent people. And you can't even get the target. See, this is where we've messed up. We've sheltered these kids from pain. Pain generates anger, and anger generates action. Whether it be positive or negative action, it's gonna generate action. And when we try to protect them and shelter them from pain in the house, they go out in the street, they don't know how to handle the emotions. They don't know what pain looks like, they don't know what struggle looked like. So they create the mud and they create in a mess, creating a bloodbath of innocent people that don't have to die, that have caused you no problem, and it and there's no threat to you and your livelihood. Nobody that you're gunning down is a threat to you and your livelihood. So why are we being so quiet? And these neighborhoods, you know, the older people are afraid to open their mouth and talk. They weren't in my time. They were not. They handled their business. You come on that block, you're gonna get your business handled. I don't care if you're two or two hundred. You bet if you're old enough to fight, you're old enough to take a link. That's how we looked at it. But now it's like, oh, well, nobody sees nothing, nobody hears nothing until it hits home. But you gotta you gotta think about these are people that you care about and love, loved ones, but yet you stay silent. I don't really understand that. But you let other people go on about hurting you, doing you bad, treating you bad, um projecting their racism to towards you and you bow down. Is this not where we came from? Have we not already fought this battle? And now we're fighting the battle and we're losing the war because we're fighting amongst our own people, our own kids are killing each other who once played together. What are you so angry about? That's the question that I have. What are you so angry about? And what's crazy is it's happening younger and younger. Like when did anger become the first response? When did talking it out stop being an option? When did parents stop going to other parents of children who were bullying them, who were bothering them, and having a conversation? When did that stop? When did you stop snatching your child up and letting them know when they're wrong has become a problem? When did that stop? When did it stop that parents had control over your children? You know when it stopped when you start putting boots on the ground with them, when you start hanging out with them, when you start treating your 13-year-old son like he's the man of your house, when you start allowing them to come in and out like they want to and not check rooms and not check phones, when you started allowing children to have access and too much viewing of social media. Everything is so quick now. Quick tempers, quick reactions, quick regrets. Now you got you did this, now you gotta go hide and stay on the run. Or now you gotta go in this nasty prison, these nasty jails, and you you you gotta bend over for somebody who has absolutely nothing to lose, or you gotta go in here and fight for your life and fight for a tampon because these girls going off to prison, they got nothing to lose. That's when it starts. Now you're regretting everything that you ever did in those five, six minutes that it took for you to just walk away, or just calm down. And most of the time it's over small stuff, something very small that turns very big, like I said, type fighting. You're raising children who are being raised by television because y'all in the street. You got time. Raise your children. Ain't no reason there is no reason why a mother or a father should be in the street as much as their kids if you got young children. You got the weekend for that. Some of y'all in the street all day, some of y'all party. There's no way I'm going to no trail rides, no parties, no clubs with no 15, 16-year-old kids. Unless then they're riding a horse. Then, yeah, because that's when. And you got your kids out here, you know they brandishing guns, you know they have guns, they got social media. It's all over their social media, and you don't even take the time to go teach them how to shoot. At least teach them how to shoot the gun. So if they're gonna have to get into a scuffle or have to do something silly or something to save their life or protect themselves, they know exactly what to hit. These people don't even know how to shoot the guns that they own. Or and you parents are looking at their pages. You're you're watching, so you know, everybody knows. What's the root of it? Let's get into that. Let's keep it real, real, and why? Because this behavior just doesn't come out of nowhere. A lot of these kids are dealing with things that don't even know, they don't know how to process. The people on these habits, we get comfortable and we like them and we don't try to break them. Who tries? Who wakes up and says, even though we know how bad sugar is for us, we know how bad cokes are for us, but we don't try to stop drinking them. We like it. We become complacent with our bad habits, even though we know it's not good for us. Crackheads know crack ain't good for them, but they they fall in love with that feeling. Smokers know smoking is not good for them, but they fall in love with that with that feeling. These bangers and these kids and out here trying to prove something because they're watching TV of people who absolutely did not do anything that they are writing about. Majority of the people have because most of the people who actually did these things, like the people I grew up in the house with and they made New Jack City off of, they want to keep their life quiet and comfortable. They want to put it in the past, what they've done and overcame, because they don't want everybody to walk in the room and see them for that. They learned a lesson. You guys are glamorizing and glorifying behavior that many people who actually did it want to forget it. That tells me that you didn't actually do it, that you ain't about their life. Because who goes on social media and tell everybody they killed somebody? Who goes on social media and brandish their guns and let everybody know what they're working with? If you want to put it up there, at least be in a group. I I, you know, we got the the National African American Gun Association. Those people are making videos, they shooting, they showing their guns, they sharing between one another what what's what uh inventory they have because it's a it's a sport. It's not that you're going out here wanting to just shoot up everybody and kill everybody for no reason. It's actually a sport, a collective sport for some people who just like to collect firearms because we have a right to bear arms. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that at 15, you don't need to be bearing nothing. Your parents need to be protecting the house. Your parents need to be worried about how they're gonna run out in the street if somebody run up on you. They need to be worried about that. They need to be teaching you how to do it when you're adult and mature enough to take care of yourself. Not that you don't have to go everywhere as a 15-year-old. Why you gotta go to the football game with a gun and shoot up the game? Why you gotta go to the party and shoot up the party when you dare to party? That's the craziest thing. Like, why in the country, especially, especially in the country? So we got a lot of kids that are dealing with a lot of things that they just don't know how to process. Mental health, anger with no outlet, trauma that nobody ever addressed. A lot of these kids going through stuff at home because them parents putting them through stuff or the people who are responsible for raising them and taking care of them have hurt them. And they have nobody to talk to. So they revert to the street. The street becomes their best friend, the gang becomes their family. And everybody in the gang don't know how to be family because they're dealing with the same trauma, the same hurt, and have the same anger. You might have one or two in there that's about their life and that's really, really, really genuine and want to see you do well and want to protect you and want to make sure things are good. But for the most part, you got a whole bunch of more people that's messed up, whole bunch of more people that's that's that's haters, whole bunch of more people that's slick snitches, whole bunch of more people that got a lot of trauma that they're not dealing with, and they pretending like they're your sister or your brother until something pops off. And then you see him, you see them for who they really are. And now the cycle continues. Your family done hurt you, the people you care about done hurt you, teacher school, principal done hurt you, now you're now your set done hurt you. So now you out here just rogue, just running rampant like a little black trump. That's what we're dealing with now. We're dealing with a whole bunch of little kids that's acting like a trump. Why are y'all acting like this? You know, your environments aren't stable, and you're making them more unstable by wreaking havoc in your neighborhood and in your area. Some of these kids don't even have guidance. They don't have anybody checking in with them. Nobody telling them, take this off your page. Don't do this, don't do that. They they have adults who are behaving like children, living vicariously through their children and saying, at a boy, that's my boy, that's my sexy boy, that's my nigga, that's my Y-E-N-S. Are you serious? That's your son. That's somebody's future husband if he makes it to see that long. That's somebody's daughter. She's not your bad bitch. That's somebody's sister. That's somebody's mother if she makes it to see that. And at the rate we're going, a lot of them are not making it. 15-year-old baby lost her life last year in Fitzgerald. 15-year-old baby lost her life this weekend at Piedmont Park. 19-year-old boy lost his life in Osula, Georgia. Had a job. So, what pissed me off when the when the young lady came on the post and voiced her opinion about it starts at home. No, everything doesn't start at home. There are plenty single black women and single black men and married black men and women who are doing an awesome job rearing their children, sending them to school every day, making sure they're involved in sports, teaching them work ethic. It's the streets that's killing them. It's the streets that's sucking them up. Where the parents are felonists they're not finishing a job. Because once you see your child going left, step in. I don't care if they're 19 or 90, step in. Step in and put your boots on their ground. Not out here in these trailers. Rise in their wheels. I'm not telling you, parents don't have fun. I clubbed, I ran the street, I did all that and the third, but home was taken care of first. Take care of home first. And we got granted, kids are gonna go out, they're gonna do what they want to do, they're gonna congregate with who they want to congregate with, they're gonna meet friends and they're gonna see things that they didn't see at home, and that's the issue I have. Introduce your children to history. Introduce your children to the struggle when your black boys know how bad the world has hated them and how bad the world has truly treated them in truth versus what they see on social media in depth. Sit them down and educate them, school them, give them history, give them knowledge. They will understand better how to preserve their life, how to care for the life that looks like them, how not to hate your brother so bad because your brother went through the same thing you went through. Girls don't have to be jealous of one another. They'll see the beauty, they'll see the culture, they'll see the common areas that they have with one another rather than hating and disliking one another. But when we sit around and we wait for the school to give the history and the conversation that we should be doing in the home, it's a problem. When you sit around and you don't talk to your kids about what happened in 1900, 1800, 1700, they don't have an understanding of what we have overcome. Because everybody wants to say, forget the history. Everybody wants you to forget something. But how can you become something if you don't know where the hell you came from? If you don't know how to triumph over tribulations, when do you win? You don't. You let the TV raise you. You let 50 Cent raise you with a fake BMF story, fake people, don't real people with fake made-up, fabricated loosely truths of what they've done. That's what we're that's the world we're living in right now. Them people home. Them people home chilling, done been there, done that, ain't worrying about this nonsense, and they steady getting rich, and your children are steady going to the ground. Steady going to the ground. You got boys out here robbing and stealing cars that ain't even worth$10,000, killing people about kids and cars and stuff that they can go obtain. They can go work at McDonald's and buy one too. Brand new. But you rather take somebody else's hard-earned money, hard-earned money into what they wanted, rather than just go work for it yourself. And then you got mamas and daddies that's sitting home knowing your child is like this, knowing your child brought a car home, knowing your child bringing guns home, knowing your child selling drugs, knowing your child done dropped out of school, knowing your child is a menace to the freaking society, and you sitting there on social media, turning up, living your best life. That's what you're doing, right? And when we don't know how to communicate pain, you act it out. A lot of these children are acting out, they just simply don't know how to communicate because pain does turn into anger. And I say it all the time: anger turns into action. Whether that action is positive or negative depends on how angry you are. If we teach our children how the pain was, for so many who made it easy for us, that anger may turn into positivity in their community. You may not want to kill your brother if you knew how many of them was hanged, chopped up, wives raped in front of their faces, daughters raped, burned, houses burned, land taken. Maybe you wouldn't know how to communicate and commune with your brother rather than hurt him because you would empathize and you would have sympathy for the fact that this could have been me. It was only 60-something years ago that slavery existed. And these kids are acting like, oh, kumbaya, fuck that. We don't care nothing about that. We ain't gonna we ain't gonna come together, we're gonna kill each other. And then what? Then what? And let's not skip over this part. This is the biggest, biggest, biggest part of our problem. Well, the second biggest part. I got one more big part. Social media and the culture. Because everything is for sure. Fights get recorded instead of stopped, arguments get posted instead of handled, people are chasing attention, even if it's negative. All post is content. No, all posts is not content. All content is not good content. You need to filter what you post, you need to filter what you say, you need to monitor what your children are watching and what they're doing. And the worst part, people are watching, laughing and sharing and hyping it up. And ain't nobody stepping in, ain't nobody saying, This ain't it. When you say that, oh, you a hater, oh you green, oh you this, that, and the third. Now knowing that some of them people that's trying to save your life done already been through the trenches, they done already said young people are pretentiously trying to live. They really done been about their life. And now you out here looking at TV and on social media and throwing up your sets and this and that, and then when the police come knocking at your door, who snitched on me? You snitched on you. You need everybody to know what you're about. You need everybody to know what you did. You need everybody to know, and I ain't saying go do stuff and try to hide it. I'm saying just stop, just stop doing it altogether. Because when you get that attention, then you want to repeat that cycle. And you want to keep going and keep going because you think you're gonna go viral. Virus the root word of virus. Virus is something bad, it's not good. Ain't a virus never been good for nobody. Whoever had diarrhea and said I love it, whoever throwed up all day and said I love it, whoever had the flu and said I love it, it's not good, but we tend to normalize it, knowing that it's dangerous, and most importantly, y'all, and I'm gonna say this real clearly. Nobody has accountability, and it's not just the kids. We gotta look at the bigger picture. Where are the parents? Where are the mentors? Where are the safe spaces? You know, you got a lot of people that swear up and down their kind of coots, kente, and um, they got all the civil rights knowledge in the world. But what where you at? Where you at? You on social media posting about stuff. You want to down Trump every day, you want to share every piece of history you got related to anybody, but where are you? Are you taught are you mentoring girls? Are you mentoring the boys? Are you really talking to them? I hopping inboxes, I tell I hey, they know. They know if they know, they know. I will come for you, little girl, little boy. And I I got my I got my chest poked out and my boots on the ground because I'm coming with an army too. But at the end of the day, where are these people? Where are the people who's saying, hey, let me teach these kids something? Let me take them and show them what it's really like in the hood. Get those buses, load them up. Don't take them to a million man march where they're safe and where it's security. No. Bust them up. Bust them up and give them a sandwich and a bottle of water and take them to the hood. Yeah. Go take them to O Block in Chi Town. Go take them to the east side of Detroit. Go take them to LA. Go take them in the worst New York streets that you can think of. Go take them where it's real. Let them see what it's like. And if they still want to come back and they still want to do what they do, then hey, I mean, you did your part, right? You did your part, but for the most part, where is the safe spaces? Where are we creating in safe spaces for these kids? Especially in small towns, because I lived there for 14 years, so I know it's nothing for them to do but walk around and congregate and the adults doing it. The adults sit around and they congregate, tell lies, sit around barrels, tell stories, because they have nothing to do either. But for the most part, they've already succumbed to that because they're grown, and they've either went off somewhere and came back and decided this is where they want to come sit and settle, or either they just never want to do a whole lot. Anyway, but the kids, the kids watching social media or watching TV, they see us a whole world out there, and that's what I say about too much exposure. Sometimes too much exposure is just too much. Too much of anything is too much. These kids didn't know what they was missing until they started on social media seeing it. Nobody in the country knew what the city was like if they never been. Nobody in the city knew what the country was like until they never been. You don't know what you miss until you see it. So now you got all this exposure and people thinking, oh, well, I could do this, I could do that, I should be wearing this, I should be in Balenciaga, I should be uh Rocky and Mooy Mooys, I should be in Tom Foy's, I should be in Cartier's and this, that, and the third. So what do they do in a in a town where there's no jobs, there's no money flow. You do what's easy. You sell dope, you rob, you do whatever you gotta do. And then you post it all over social media and make yourself look like you're doing something, you know. I remember um a conversation I had with one of my girlfriends um back in the day when uh we were doing parties or whatever, and you know, I said, what's the point in bringing these couches down here? Like creating this facade of you're in a VIP station and this, that, and the third, and we're in a daycare, we're in a in a gym. Like um, I didn't get it, but it gave cute pictures and it made nice snap and it made a nice little environment. But when the lights came on, you moved the furniture out, you still was in a in a after-school program building. It didn't change nothing, it changed a thought, it gave you a facade, it let you fake it until you make it. But if you really want to have that type of party and you want to have that type of experience, go where it's given, go where it's actually at and experience it and determine if you like it or don't like it and come back home. But see, what happened is it gave this false sense of of city life in a small town, and they start behaving like these people because the the you when you got a million people in the city, you're gonna have attitude, you're gonna have problems, you're gonna have issues, you're gonna have robbers, you're gonna have killers, you're gonna have drugs, you're gonna have a whole lot of stuff that you wouldn't have in rural towns as much, and that's the beauty of a small town. You want to escape the nonsense, you want to escape the traffic, you want to escape not knowing your neighbors, you want to escape all the stuff that comes with living in a big city. So I never understood why so many people wanted to be a gangster in a small town. Love yourself for who you are, like what you like, talk to your neighbor, say hello, go down the street, leave your door unlocked, and come back home and everything is intact. It ain't gonna happen nowhere else. It won't happen a day in Detroit. You be cleaned out. It won't happen. Your kids probably won't even make it to the next bus stop if they gotta catch a city bus because somebody's gonna be out there probably doing something. Um, and who knows, booze never had names. People dying, people. They are actually dying in these streets for no reason, especially in the black community. But let's just talk about the second part of the problem, the final part of the problem. Let's talk about a solution because we can shift this and we can say where it starts, where it ends, what we need to do, have conversations at home, listen to our youth, mentor them, teach them, control them, blah blah blah. We can say all that stuff. But most importantly, we gotta be present and we gotta actually implement what we say, we gotta do what we say. We can't be worried about if the police are gonna come lock us up if we beat our kids' ass. No, your children should be more scared of you than any human walking this earth. And if you ain't about that life, that's why your kids ain't doing what they want to do. Because they know that at home their mamas and daddies is really soft as fuck. So at the end of the day, if you really as soft as you are behind closed doors and your kids know it, they ain't never gonna fear you. And you if I can't go in the street and call my child's name, hey, stop. When I woke roll up, if I can't shut it down, I ain't done my job. Because you might can't control them to a certain extent, and you might lose some of that control for a minute. But at the end of the day, if they fear you as much as they fear jail, prison, death, they'll stand down. A parent that loses control over their child has lost control over the freaking community. You can't go tell, you can't expect nobody else to go tell your child what to do. If you can't tell them what to do, if you're mad at somebody else trying to help you out, then what do you think is gonna happen? All my mother had to do was look at me. And I knew to take that mess somewhere else, take it to the west side, take my bad habits over here somewhere. Because if it gets back over here and she find out I gotta deal with this crazy lady. Yeah, that's the type of fear you should have in your children, and not so you can control them, so you can save them. Because the streets ain't nothing nice, and the streets ain't gonna care no more about them than the next person in the street. You gotta care more about your child to give tough love than the street gonna give them. The street's gonna give them tough death. It's gonna give them an agonizing death. It's not gonna give them no kind of love. It's gonna give them trauma, it's gonna give them prison sentences, it's gonna give them death, it's gonna give them blood in the streets, and it's gonna give you a black dress, a black suit, some flowers, and some goddamn doves. And if you don't believe it, keep watching. That's what you do. Just keep watching because it's happening right in your face. So, yeah, the streets are talking, but if you don't start listening and acting, we're gonna keep losing our kids. This isn't just content. This is real life. It's content maybe to them, it's content maybe to you to share the nonsense you share fighting this and that. And and anybody that's ever known me in real life can tell you kids ain't fought in my face. They ain't fought in my face. I've had to argue with parents about children out there fighting. Matter of fact, I had to argue with the one who gave the party about kids out there fighting. No, they're not gonna fight. They're not gonna fight in my face. And if you want to come up against me, come up against me and see what we're working with. Because one thing about it, y'all, you can either have a good life or a bad life. You can have a peaceful life or you can have a tumorless life. You can have you can bring solutions to the table or you can be the problem. Ain't no gray area. It ain't no in-between. Stop acting like it's an in-between. And I still went way over. I said I was gonna keep y'all 15 minutes, but this is so passionate to me. I really, really wanted to get in your head. I want to get in your head, and I want you to understand where we are. Y'all stop partying with these freaking kids. Y'all stop showing these kids examples. My children are good and grown. Before I ever sit down at a table where alcohol was served with them. Stop acting like your kids are your best friends first, and then but they still gotta go to the street and get best friends. No, talk to your children, communicate with your children. Let them show their ass in the house. And when they get in the street, act like they got some sense. Because one thing about it, like I always told my, like my mama told me, I'm coming, no matter what. Good, bad, right or wrong, I'm coming. But you better not lie to me. So if your children are lying to you, and I would tell my mama anything, I would tell my mama anything. Hey, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. This gotta be done. She can talk till she's blue in the face. Key, no, no, key, key. I'm doing it. I'm suffering my consequences. Whoop-de-hoop, whatever, whatever. It's gonna happen. I'm about to go do this and I'm about to go do that. But when I need you to come, she's coming. But she already knows what done went down. Y'all don't have this line of communication with your kids. Y'all got y'all kids thinking they gotta go everywhere else to talk to everybody else or do everything under the under the table with no protection, no guidance, and no understanding from the people that they supposed to trust and love. Y'all bring any men around your daughters, they treat them any kind of way, they hurt them, and now your daughters are broken and damaged and lost, and you still with these same old old knuckleheads, you still rolling around and posting pictures and acting like y'all in love, knowing this man is nasty, a doll, a mutt. How you think that's making your daughter feel? Now your daughter going looking for the banger that can protect her. She going, she going sitting up in the spot. She going and do exactly what they do because she feels protected now, because you failed her. So, no, while I don't think it all starts at the home, I think it ends at the home. Because mom and daddy, y'all should be able to handle your business with your children. And for you men out there, we ain't gonna even talk about you men who ain't paying attention to your kids, who ain't paying attention to your sons, who know that you have sons out here and know that you have not played your part or your role. God is watching and He's gonna deal with you. He's gonna deal with you explicitly. And I hope it's expeditiously. Because you failed your boys. Street shouldn't have had to raise your boys if you did job. And if you wanted to raise them street, at least you would have given them some tutelage and some guidance on how to be street. They wouldn't have to get it off of rap songs and videos. You know, you got people like offset up here acting like he's so hard, this, and the third. And boy, you sitting in a wheelchair looking like somebody just took your manhood. This is who's raising our children. People who are absolutely not doing what they say they're doing. They just making money, they making music, they making movies. That's it. So, with that being said, I need y'all to do more than just listen. I need y'all to have some action. Talk about it, check in on somebody, mentor somebody. Don't just post about it, don't just share it. Change you, adults. And maybe we can change our kids. This is Running My Podcast with your girl key. And I said what I said, and I'll catch y'all next episode. Y'all be easy, be blessed, be safe, and most importantly, be wise. Be wise.