A problem in our communities is that we have been conditioned to think, us over I, or we over me, so we go about trying to fix all of OUR problems at once, as opposed to fixing our own personal problems first, which inherently fixes the whole! The problem with this thinking is that you cannot fix the whole without first fixing the individual parts of the whole!
For example, if your car breaks down do you instruct the mechanic to fix the whole car, or the part of the car that’s broken, even if it’s more than one part, each part needs to be fixed individually! Or if you go to the doctor, will they fix your heart and lungs too if there’s no problem with them, or do they fix what’s broken, in order to heal the whole!
Each person is his/her own component of the community/whole, and if each one of these individuals fixed the problems that they cause, the whole would be healed! For example, can we stop all gang banging tomorrow? No! But can we stop all gang banging over time if we fixed the things that cause our children to join gangs? Yes! So each individual that we can stop from joining a gang, helps the whole community!
At the end of the day, the reason why we can’t heal our communities as a whole is because everyone is on different levels of the overall problem, and attribute to different parts of the overall problem!
We can’t stop drug dealing if we don’t have jobs to offer the dealers!
We can’t stop gang banging if the kid comes from a broken home, and seeks fatherly or brotherly love, if we can’t provide that!
We can’t build profitable businesses that hire the drug dealers, if we don’t support our own Black owned businesses when they open!
And we definitely can’t do anything for our communities if we don’t understand these basic analogies!