Guilty By Affiliation

 

This blog was inspired by a childhood friend who I was having a conversation with via inbox on Facebook.

We were reminiscing about our Pop Warner football days and basically how we were young and innocent.

How we both lived in different neighborhoods along with our fellow teammates and we were all once friends.

Until…. We grew older and started joining our neighborhood gangs and that changed everything.

The older we got, the worse it got!!

We started sitting in separate circles according to our gangs or the gangs we were allies with.

From there it became fists fights and eventually someone killing a person who once was their friend.

I remember one year our football team became one of the worse and our coaches quit on us.

Our problem wasn’t that we had sorry players, we had some of the best players in the city and we played together for many years.

The problem we were divided because of our gang affiliation.

The coaches that took over our team had to cut some of our best players and threatened to cut more of us.

We decided to settle our differences and bang on the field, meaning represent what we loved, (football)!!

We did not make it to the playoffs that year, we went to what they called the toilet bowl.

But, we ran up the scoreboard on the teams that we played and the other teams' parents were wondering how we did not make it the playoffs?!

The falling year, we made it to last around of playoffs and that would be the last year that some of us would actually play football together.

Some of us went on to play in high school while others would end going to juvenile, later to prison, and or to that grave!!

My friend that inspired this blog, we both admitted to each other neither one of us was about that life (gang-banging), we were both just guilty by affiliation.

As the saying goes, “you are who you hang with.”

My friend and I became gang members because who we hanged with and that was our neighborhood friends.

So parents, monitor who your children hang with!!