Yusef Wiley reflects on 25 years and how a single conversation changed his life. He argues people aren't born evil but shaped by trauma and circumstance, and that his own path from gang involvement to Islam came through dialogue and reading. He believes openness to conversation is the key to reducing crime and violence.
Chapters
Good evening, everyone. Over the last 25 years of my life, I recall so many moments where it was just a matter of a conversation that I had with someone, and over the course of that conversation, change began to enter that person's heart. It happened so many times that I began to realize that even if a person doesn't have the upbringings or the, you know, the past or the training or the education or whatever the case may be to be a good person, to be a righteous person, um, you know, being a victim of circumstances and childhood trauma, you name it. Um, people are just not born evil and doing wrong. You know, when we turn on the news, the evening news, and we see all of this crime and killing and corruption and robbing and stealing, you know, the first thing comes to our mind is that these just bad people, that they just inherently bad. When that is not the case. Because again, over the course of 25 years of my life, I can tell you a number of instances where so many individuals, just over a course of a conversation, change entered their heart and they was ready to change. In some cases, that change meant that they became Muslims. They took the shahada, they became a Muslim like myself. In other cases, they became better Christians if they were Christians, or if they were Jews, or if there was Buddhists, because it was many, you know, it was many. So, and that just brings me to this subject that, you know, just open up, just open up to change. Even if you don't know where to go from here, even if you don't feel like you have the tools to really be different, you feel like you've been dealt that bad hand and you know, I'm not going to change. I'm never going to get better. I'm going to be this crazy person the rest of my life. No, no. Look at me. I was a gangbanger. I was a, bad person. I did bad things, a lot of bad things, and people could have described me in the same way, but I changed over a course of conversations, over a course of reading books, and for myself being placed in isolation. All of these different things led up to my decision to say, you know what, it's time to change. And from that point forward, I began to listen to people that had wisdom, that had insight about life, about success, about getting ahead. And I opened up to it. I was wide open to it. Once I became wide open to it, all the Demons from my past began to fade away, and that's usually how it works. And it can work like that for you. It definitely can work like that for you. You just have to make the decision to say, you know what, I'm ready to change. I'm open. I'm ready to open up to this change. So whoever is willing to talk to me, who is ever willing to sit down with me, Whoever that person is that's willing to have that conversation with me, I'm open. And if that happens, you will experience change taking place right before your very eyes. Now, this is how you reduce recidivism. This is how you reduce crime. This is how we can literally wipe out the violence and death and destruction that we see in our communities. But the key is getting people to open up, getting people just to listen to reason for the very first time. And you'll be surprised with what happened as a result of that. Peace.
