Family Cycles In My Community

My neighborhood in north city St. Louis is desolate, vacant houses covered in graffiti and barbed wired fenced in empty parking lots consume every street corner. The people walking the streets of Garfield, Tayler, and Martin Luther King grew up poor with nothing, and you can bet that the children they birth will be consumed by poverty and grow up with nothing and be poor as well. They will most likely stay in the same area for their entire lifetime there is no such thing as an American Dream on this part of the city. Majority of this community makes less than $14,000 per year; 53% of students are chronically absent from school; most adults have not gone beyond high school; and 90% of young people, ages 18-24, are unemployed. 39% of African …show more content…
This is beyond a doubt out of your control it doesn’t matter what religion you are born into neither does it matter the ritual. Families across the world face some sort of issue, some families may seem perfectly fine wealthy and healthy, however, other families are effected by generations of sickness, drug abuse, poverty, lack of education, and a lump sum more of things. These things that happen for generations at a time that seem to be a hassle to break and hard to avoid are called family cycles. A family cycle are the stages you go through from the time you are child to the time you are an elderly member in your family, the moments and accomplishments that happen during this time are called family life cycles. My family for several generations has been consumed by poorness, no one has a college degree and no one has a job that barely pays over minimum wage. In my lifetime, I would most certainly love to break the cycles of poverty but the universe of course has to play devil’s advocate. In order to break this cycle there are steps one must take to start their journey. I want to argue that the first step in breaking a cycle is having an ah-ha! Moment you must understand that you are stuck in a generational cycle, you cannot fix something you are not aware of. One needs to realize poverty is way more complex than it used to be in the past The brain …show more content…
Poverty is proven to challenge ones executive decision making. As I talked about in the last paragraph executive decision making is your ability to make high risk decisions while being under pressure. I like to call this my hustle or my grind. A basketball player has to think on his feet during a game he has to know how to move and where to go for each play, dribble the ball, and concentrate on his feet all while thinking of what’s the best play. I make those same executive decisions in life. I have to multi-task, organize a set of steps to change my life, control my inhibitions, and most importantly I have to remember what my goal is all while under pressure. I have to remember how to stay focused in the mist of living situation and corrupt violent community. Facing these complex life battle on a daily are helping me develop brain muscles and that’s what is helping me break the