Series: Unleashing the Best from the Worst. Episode 3

Hey, welcome to episode 3. It's quite alarming that we're at this place now of realization that you've become a gang member, a thug. Now, I don't enjoy talking about this. It's actually kind of disturbing. It actually brings back some, some memories, some thoughts that, um, I'm not too proud of. So bear with me on this session as we go into this more in-depth discussion of unleashing the best from the worst. Mind you, today, today, understand, please understand that I'm a different man. I'm a different person. I'm a different human being. You know, I've enjoyed quite a bit of success, um, since my release from incarceration in 2012. So understand that, please understand that I'm not talking to you today as someone that is still in that lifestyle, had that indulge in any form or fashion of that life that I once, uh, participated in as a thug. Um, but I want to say now that we're going into a more deeper area of being an actual gang member I will try my best to avoid specific crimes that were committed because I don't want to implicate anyone, uh, in any crimes that they've never been convicted of or incriminate myself from past crimes. So I wanna, I wanna be careful in how I talk about this next episode that we're in of Unleashing the Best from the Worst. Because now I'm a gang member, right? Now in this life of being a gang member, I'm starting to experience changes in my attitudes. The attitude towards my teachers in school attitude towards siblings, attitude towards my own parents, attitude towards the pastor of the church, just in general, the neighbors, the, the community, how we feel when we're in this condition. It's, it's a very interesting, uh, place to be in when you really think about it, because as we grow in our adolescence, we become older and we're changing. We're already going through a change where our bodies are changing, we're developing. But for someone like this, you're talking about development that is along the wrong path. It's not the development of having mentors. It's not the development of, uh, being in school and getting good grades and playing sports, having pretty much the right people around you in your environment. It's, it's a development that's happening that's teaching you the rules of the streets, the rules of surviving in a lawless sense in the world versus being law-abiding. And that's when your belief system change, your belief window, the things that you once believed in growing up that you were taught by your parents, that you were taught by your teachers, that you were taught, um, in your early stages of development as a, as a youth are gone. They're, they're literally challenged because that doesn't fit with the current lifestyle that you're going into in becoming this bad person. It doesn't fit. So anything that doesn't fit has to be tossed out as, um, a bad thing. So when you encounter someone like that, if you encounter someone that is on the straight and narrow, how's that person, person treated? Now, these are the kids that end up being bullied. These are the kids that end up being teased. All of these things begins to happen as you become this bad person. So understand what that means and how that changes the dynamics of your development. Because once you cross that, that line of actually doing something that warrants your arrest, that warrants your, uh, being, uh, chastised or anything like that, right? Once that happens, you're a different human being. You're literally a different human being. You— it's, it's all about now going with the flow. You're just going to go with the flow. For me, without getting too specific, I found myself in an environment where a group of us were in a place where things begin to transpire. Things begin to transpire, uh, physical violence began to happen. And you have that slight, that really brief window, that moment where you have to decide, am I gonna say, oh man, what have I done, let me move away from this life? Let me step back. This is not who I am. You have that short, really small window to say that in that scenario, as you're realizing that you're no longer the child, the young man that your parents were raising you to be. That, that, that moment of thought that, that goes through your brain when all of the fighting and violence, everything is beginning to happen, and you're with that group. You're with that group, and you have to decide, I'm in or I'm out. Now, we already know The consequences if I say I'm out, the consequences if I say no, I can't do this, the challenges of do I have a big brother at home, do I have someone that's going to protect me, am I going to still wake up every day in the same neighborhood and community and face these same people that I said no to. What do I do? Do I go with it? Do I try to justify the bad and say, you know what, if I go with it, I'm gonna be looked at as a tough guy? I'm gonna be looked at as somebody that's admired, somebody that, um, this guy don't play, he don't mess around. Mm, check him out. You did that, bro. Right on, man. Come on, we together. We, we got this. Let's go do this. Let's go terrorize this community. Let's go terrorize this neighborhood. Let's go terrorize these weak people amongst us, right? You only have a small window to make that decision. Very small. But for me, obviously I made the bad decision. I ended up in jail. I ended up going through juvenile facilities. I ended up going to county jails. I ended up in prison, right? So obviously I made the wrong choice. For me, I thought that was the choice that I needed to make. To not only be alive, to be pat on the back, to be seen as somebody that's, um, he got it. I needed that for my ego. I needed that because this might give me somewhere else in life that Maybe I might like it. I might like driving down the street in lowriders and playing loud music and being disruptive and loud. I might enjoy doing that. That, that might be what I really want to do. And I made that choice to go to the other side. I went to the other side. My dress code changed. I made sure I shopped for the things that gang members dress, attire. I begin to do these things because I realized that I wanted to go forward and see what's the end result. And when you do that, there's no turning back. There's literally no turning back, cuz once you cross that line and you become that bad person, that's it. It's a done deal. Can't go back now, it's too late. Because there's a worse circumstance. You better off when you have that split moment to decide this is not for me before it happens the first time. If you don't make that decision then you might as well stay in the game. That's, that's the, that's the mentality. That's the mindset. You might have survived and been okay if you had to say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. This is, fellas, nice knowing you, I'm out. You probably would have survived. I probably would have survived going that route and saying, you know what, I'm about to buckle down, I'm about to go back to school, I'm about to get my grades up. I'm about to go get with my siblings and say, hey, I need help with homework. I need to get it together. Just imagine, I could have did that and would have probably been better off. But had I attempted to do that, make that type of choice after I've already crossed that line and got involved with the violence, with the fights, with the gang activity and then decide after a week or two or whatever, you know what, man, ah, I probably would have been in worse shape. I might have would have been jumped, killed, stabbed, dragged. No telling what would have happened to me. This is the life that many folks don't really understand. They try to make it look good in Hollywood, you know, they show you these movies And you know, people get excited and like, oh yeah, look at that, them dudes, man, that's what I'm talking about, you was a gangster. You know, they try to make it look good, make it feel like you really something, but you're nothing. You're, you're just a loser. You're becoming a loser. And that's the reality. And this is what I did. I continued along that path.. And as I realized this was happening to me, I ended up in high school, made it, didn't graduate from middle school, uh, wasn't allowed to walk the stage because my grades wasn't where they needed to be. I went to— I had to go to summer school, um, went to a middle school, Enterprise, um, our current school, which was Vanguard Junior High School, wasn't offering, um, uh, summer school the year that I was to graduate, um, or attempting to graduate. So I ended up going to Enterprise Middle School, Junior High School, uh, at the time. And back then, we, you know, the junior high school went all the way up to the 9th grade. So you graduated from the 9th grade, then you end up in the 10th grade at high school. So this was another opportunity again for me to get it together, get it together. Ended up at a junior high school that was the school of my so-called enemies, you know. We were Bloods at our school at Vanguard, and at Enterprise they were Crips, the enemies. We were the red and they were the blue. And they told me, look, if you want to graduate, if you want to make it to high school, you're going to go to summer school at Enterprise. I said, okay. You guess what? First day of school, I'm in trouble. I'm getting into it with folks. I brought a knife to school and my father was called from work. Never forget, they called a group of us inside the auditorium and we thinking it was some kind of orientation or whatever they trying to— but they wanted us in there because they wanted to see who was at their school that's going to be creating a problem for them. So we had the staff, the faculty, all in the gymnasium, and I'm there. A group of us are there from our school. There's a group of the kids that attend that school, um, and we're in there and we're wondering what's going on because they're all standing in front of us like, you know, watching us, you know, with their arms folded, standing in front of us, watching us. And I'm like, what's going on, right? So a few minutes go by, and here the door swings open real hard to the gymnasium, and it was law enforcement. Law enforcement was coming in to give us a pep talk. They came in there and said, you know, We know that some of you kids are from another school that wear red, and you know, this is a school that wears blue. They was just— they made it plain and they told us that they wasn't going to tolerate it. They told us they wasn't going to tolerate it, but of course, you know, we're kids, we're not listening. Um, A few days go by, you know, ruckus, fighting, fists swinging bad, all bad, right? Call my father. They call my father at work. He was the contact that they had. Called my father, and my father was tough. My father was you know, tough guy. And when they called him up to the school, they had me in the office, and before he got there, they had me in handcuffs. They know they shouldn't have been doing that, right? We were still kids, you know, 9th grader. And they took the cuffs off before he got there, and when he got there, he was, you know, you could see it on his face, like This guy, this boy, right? And I sat down. The school security walked in along with my teachers and, you know, staff, administrators, and they said, now that you're here, Mr. Wiley, we want to, we want to search your son. We want to search. Remember I said I had a knife? I brought to school. Luckily, I got rid of that knife before all of that stuff happened. When I seen law enforcement on campus, I got rid of that knife. Uh, so, but when they searched me, pat me down, check my wallet, I had a marijuana joint in my wallet. It literally fell out when they opened my wallet. The marijuana joint fell out. This is the '80s, y'all. You're not doing this to my kind of parents, right? So immediately when that marijuana just dropped on the ground, my father looked up, it swung on me. Boom! They was like, oh, started the whole office, because he's a big, you know, big hands. My father was, you know, he swung. Boom! I was like, man. But you know what? I didn't cry, and I just picked up my wallet, left the joint down there, and was like, hmm. I just kind of like, okay, this is, this is the direction I'm going in, I guess. I accepted that this would be my life. Very sad. We'll talk more about that in the next episode. Peace.