Transcript
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Hey, welcome back to another episode of let's Just Talk About it podcast.
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I'm your host, chuck, and if you're here for the first time, this platform was created to give genuine people just like you an opportunity to share a portion of your life's journey.
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So, with that being said, today I have returning guest, my friend Antonio Morgan, back just to have a genuine conversation about his views on today's society and his passion to make changes in our school system to help children be exposed to greater possibilities in their future.
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So, hey, you don't want to miss this amazing conversation today.
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As a matter of fact, do me a favor go and grab your husband, your wife, your children, or even call a friend and gather around to listen to my conversation with Antonio on let's Just Talk About it podcast.
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Hey, let's jump right in.
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Welcome back to another episode of let's Just Talk About it podcast.
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Today I have my main man, tony Morgan, a returning guest.
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What's up, tony?
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Hey, chuck, what's going on?
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Doing good man, how you doing today?
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Man.
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I'm taking it one day at a time, chuck.
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That's all I can do, man.
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Yes sir, yes sir man, I just wanted to have you on, man, to have a general conversation about.
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You know how we see life and you know what's going on today in our world and in our society.
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You know what I'm saying?
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Just to have that conversation.
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And since the last time we talked, what have you been up to?
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You know, I remember the last time I you know, on the show, I was talking about the difficulties I was having finding a job because I'm a four-time felon yeah, some felonies that occurred 20 years ago and it has been a struggle.
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Things are looking up.
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It's giving me an opportunity to look into entrepreneurship, okay, and also get into a field that I like you know that I love to do, and some things are looking up so far.
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But there's still a lot of roadblocks and I think about the people that's coming behind me.
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I work with an agency and there are some guys dealing with the same situation coming out of incarceration.
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I'm just trying to figure out.
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It seems like you're hitting a roadblock sometimes when you have kids, you're trying to have re-entry into the community and you want to find work and there's not a lot of good jobs, especially those that are paying well.
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That's a roadblock.
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We fall into man.
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So you know it's a struggle.
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I was really thinking about getting a signature list together, about maybe taking something out of the state capitol, because in a lot of states they only go back seven years.
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Virginia is indefinite.
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What's seven years for what?
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Seven years that you can pull up your criminal record and go back seven years.
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Virginia is indefinite.
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Seven years for what?
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Seven years that you can pull up your criminal record and go back seven years?
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Yes, In Virginia it's indefinite.
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They don't have a seven-year law in Virginia.
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When you say indefinite meaning they can go back as far as they want to go back.
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As far as they want to go back on a consumer report.
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When they pull the Consumer Report, instead of going back a certain amount of years, it's pulling up felonies, if you have felonies from the 90s or going back if they say you know, something that happened to me back in 98 came up on my record Wow, you know, came up on my record.
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Society I've gone to the point that I've gone back to school to pursue my degree.
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I have my rights to vote and that's the thing that always gets me.
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I have the right to vote and run for public office, but I can't wash cars at Avis Rental $13 an hour because of my background.
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Because of my background, I'm not a violent offender, I'm not a sex offender and it's getting to a point that in Virginia it's been a hard road, but I'm still staying steady with it, chuck.
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Yeah, man, commonwealth of Virginia is something else, man, because there's a lot of guys who've been incarcerated like 30, 40 years, man.
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They just won't give them parole and I don't understand.
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How many times can you pay your, your debt to society?
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You know what I mean.
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And then, when you, then when you come out, you're like under the gun because they make it hard for you to get work, because they look at your record.
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You know it is chuck, but, you know, being in being a cosplayer gave me an opportunity to enlighten myself.
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You know, do a lot of reading, yeah, so the one thing that always caught my mind, you know, especially about the systems in America, I think about the caste system.
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You know, for those who don't know what a caste system is, it's a system and a class structure that is determined by birth and basically it means that in some societies, the opportunity you have access to depends on the families you happen to be born into.
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I happen to be born a black boy, you know, and yeah, so I'm a black, I was born a black boy, I'm an African-American man and, you know, I hear kids always say I want to be like Mike, I want to be like LeBron, but I never hear people say I want to be born a black boy or a black girl, you know.
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And I started thinking about the challenges we have here in America.
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You know, I think about that caste system and I'm reading a book that was on the New York Times bestseller list, called the New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, which is a great book.
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OK, talk about that.
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Yeah, she's, she's.
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She was a civil rights lawyer, she turned a legal scholar and she wrote about the American caste, the caste system in America, but she called it redefined.
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You know, as far as Jim Crow is redefined.
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So we talk about the rights that we had by amendment, rights that people fought for, their civil rights that have the rights to serve on juries, the right to vote, but yet we still have legal discrimination, discrimination, housing, access to education.
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All these things are still a problem.
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You know, for people of color especially, it's tenfold once you have a convicted felon.
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Right.
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So I always like the way that she uses it.
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She says that people are reentering society.
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You know, citizens reentering society, and I like that better than ex-felon you know?
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Yeah, that is a little bit better re-entry.
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Yeah, she says returning citizen, which I love that.
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Yeah, because, chuck, it's like when I was listening to some of her numbers and I went back and I researched it, you know, like in 2014, it was 2.3 million people, it was 34% of the population, or it was in the correctional population that included 4.5 million more people that was on probation, and this came from the criminal justice report fact sheet from the NAACP.
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So, you know, when I started thinking about it, chuck, and I look at America, you know sometimes, as, being a person of color, you're running so many roadblocks, but you actually say why is it?
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And, you know, I really believe that we come together as a nation to address some of these issues and I don't think that America will be right until it does.
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Yeah, that's why you got people like Marva King and Karen Morrison who have that passion, that advocacy passion to help other people who are incarcerated.
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You know what I'm saying?
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Everybody's not going to have that passion until it knocks on your door.
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Then you'd be like okay what do I do next?
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So you got people like Marva King and Karen Morrison who are doing a good job, man advocating for people who are incarcerated.
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They're like the Moses of our day.
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You know what I'm saying Like going and get people out of that bondage, helping them come out of there.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely, and I think the biggest thing was the bondage of the mind.
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You know you can enslave a body, but when you enslave a mind that's an atrocity.
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Because you know we have a god-given gift to flourish man, to be beneficial to society.
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Man we create about wonderful god and wonderful things.
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It's sad that there are so many people that can contribute to society.
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Man we create about wonderful God and wonderful things.
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It's sad that there are so many people that can contribute to society that have not been given a chance to contribute.
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You know, and it weighs on me because you know, I've been around in this country all my life and I'm a half a century years old and I'm not slow to the game you know things that are going on in America.
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But when I look at it, Chuck, you know there are so many things that we spend money allocating funds to foreign wars and foreign affairs yeah, but we haven't even had the conversation of reparation funds.
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Man, Got you For the people who don't understand what you're talking about.
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Talk about that.
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Reparation funds are funds that are being given to the descendants of slaves and it's for the wages that were not paid for 400 years 400 plus years, you know, doing the world wars and the things that happen to people overseas, where they were given reparations, even in Europe and Japan.
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And when we look at the atrocities that's been done in America we have against people of color, we we have swept it under the rug and they continue to have pledged some kind of allegiance for the powers that be and I'm not calling out a race, I'm not calling out an institution but there's been something that has been against people of color that has not been talked about.
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You know, and that's an ugly thing that's going on in America that we deal with the racism and we deal with the bias.
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You know, we deal with the people who've been disenfranchised, chuck, and I'm not just talking about I know we have a lot of things going on in America because we have different nationalities.
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We have an issue in America about immigration and people have been ostracized because they're immigrants, and we're talking about reparations that should be given to people who are descendants of slaves that America have built their backs on, and I think that there's a conversation that needs to be had in America.
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I agree.
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Yeah, Let me ask you this, though Like being where we are, I know we have a long way to go from you know, even from slavery to now.
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There's still some some things we got to deal with as a black man or black woman or whatever, but we've made progress.
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So do you feel like we should take advantage of what we have now in terms of being able to go back to school?
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In terms of being able to go back to school, you know, the power to get wealth and so forth and to be that creator or entrepreneur that you can be?
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You're free to do that.
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Do you think that if we was to take advantage of that, that freedom that we have now, that we can go further?
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I think all those things are good all above, but I think we should take the freedom that we have now to have our civil liberties.
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But we should take the freedom that we have now to have our civil liberties, but we should take the freedom to enlighten ourselves about what the status quo is in America.
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I think once we do that, we can divert what funds and different opportunities we can have to a place that we can transcend where we've been.
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That's true.
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So if we continue to give back into a system that we've been inoculating in, we continue to feed the system.
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You know, it's like a mouse chasing a ball through a maze.
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You know, never rising above the maze to find a way out.
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And it's not a point that we want to find.
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We want equality because a lot of us are still treated like second-class citizens.
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I agree I agree, I agree, but we still have the opportunity now to rise above it.
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And you're absolutely right, especially people coming out with you know, transitioning from prison to now you know what I mean.
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It is hard, so you're going to be treated less than and, uh, it's going to be more of a struggle to get to where you want to be, but it's possible.
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You know what I'm saying.
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It's possible.
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It all depends where you want to be.
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Education is your goal, fine, get an education.
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But don't get a point.
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To get an education that you continue to feed the system.
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You know to educate yourself.
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I went to school.
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I went to school.
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I went to college, got you.
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I took opportunity and I'm grateful for that.
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It was a point for me, and education is called higher learning.
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If you go to school and you learn what has been taught in a textbook and never elevate your thought, then you're still in the same system.
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So when you talk about elevating yourself and have opportunities, you know, remember we rent space in America, chuck, you said we rent it.
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We rent space because we pay taxes.
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What do you mean?
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Because if you don't pay your taxes, they come take it.
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Okay, you know, if you don't make payments, you know a lot of people have mortgages and different things like that Got you.
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But once you don't pay taxes in America, they can take everything you own or send you to prison.
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Or send you to prison, you know what I'm saying?
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Yeah, so really nothing you own.
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So if you work in a system that's truly not yours, what are you working for?
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You know what I'm saying?
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You should be working for legacies, you know, and educating our children, because you know, when I look now, it's like America is like dumbed down that we focus on as a people.
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You know, even from when we came into this country, with the separation of slavery, we have different things that have gone on with Jim Crow, we've gone on with poverty and we see the separation of family and knowledge and information, but yet we come back and we feed back into the same system that enslaves us, and that's the thing that we should break free of.
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We have an opportunity while we still can think on our own.
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That's free thinking.
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So I believe that's something that can't be replaced, you know, and if you talk about achieving a goal, chuck, it's freedom freedom to think and free young minds to flourish.
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Okay and yeah.
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So you look at the things that's going on today.
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How many opportunities do you see for kids first in their minds, instead of getting caught up on social media different things that they face in school, you know, and you start seeing young people you're like wondering why they're going through so many things now, you know, and they don't have an opportunity to start freeing their mind and think things higher.
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I believe in my view.
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So who do you blame for that?
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Does it start in the home or do we blame everybody else?
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No, we got to look at ourselves.
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Okay, we got to look at ourselves because you know, and I know everybody don't have that, that environment to flourish.
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You know what I'm saying but, people who do it has to start at home you know it starts at home, but everybody at home, home is not the same.
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There's a lot of things going on In the home that's what I'm saying.
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Everybody don't have that Environment to flourish.
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You know Absolutely.
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And I love what I think it was Dame Das.
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Dame said that you know you keep these kids in classrooms that look like prisons and they sit there for all those hours and they go to school and they sit there for those hours, cubicle.
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You sit there and you continue to feed the system.
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You know, this is the thing that we want to break through.
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You got these kids, man, who are poets, artists, talented musicians, spoken word, architects, and these are the things we should be working at honing on kids, exposing them to different things.
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But see, this is when I start talking about this, chuck, and I'm not pointing out anybody in particular If you've gone to a school system and you educate these kids, but yet you go to work every day with a status quo and you're okay with that and you're going into retirement, then you failed the kids.
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If that's your profession, you failed them Because if you knew and you know that you refuse to do anything about it, it just takes one spark and I'm not talking about a revolution of violence, I'm talking about a revolution of knowledge to start educating kids and start telling them that hey, there's another way.
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And I see all these nonprofits and there are a lot of good nonprofits, but we got to stop putting band-aids on things and actually get kids to flourish.
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And I'm not talking about just brown kids, I'm talking about tan kids, yellow kids.
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I'm not talking about just brown kids.
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I'm talking about tan kids, yellow kids, white kids.
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I'm talking about everyone.
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So how would you go about doing it?
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If you had the opportunity right now, the funds right now, Tony Morgan, how would you address it?
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What would you do?
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I would start a school without walls.
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Okay, talk about it.
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I would start a school without walls.
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I would start a facility where people are going to credit their kids to have their college degrees by the time they're 16.
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You see, because I have accredited teachers there in the classroom to give them their credited hours on the things they like to do, I would do a battery of tests to find out what range kids and what do they gravitate to, and those are the curriculum that I will put kids in and give them a credit hour.
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So we'll have doctors at the age of 19.
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So if you love medicine and biology, from the age of nine you can spend your teenage years learning to be a doctor.
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Learning how to do it early.
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That's right Early, and not just entrepreneurship.
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Yeah, it makes sense, you know.
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But we don't do that because we need these fundings.
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We need these grants, we need these charters.
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We got to be approved by such and such the same states, people that keep us, you know, in bondage, and that's what I believe and I don't want to quote from someone else.
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But they said that we don't need politicians.
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We need statesmen for benefits of the people.
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We don't need politicians running for the next election and changing for the status quo to get elected.
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We need statesmen.
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That's going to be beneficial to the people.
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So a lot of people want to be in a position of power.
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Well, how do they use that power?
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Because we're all going to be held accountable for it and someone who is working in the system.
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If they go home every night and know the system is broken but yet don't do anything about it, let's even just tell somebody educate them.
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This should be free class education, because if somebody had told me when I was young that a felony would affect me for the rest of my life and broke that down for me, I would have been a law-abiding citizen as much as possible.
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I'm not saying I wouldn't have had a traffic violation, but I wouldn't have done what I was going to do because I didn't want to spend time in prison.
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I just I really wanted somebody to be there for me.
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I'm a survivor of childhood abuse.
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I just needed somebody to be there for me and I took that into adulthood, that same mentality and that same hurt.
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So I see these same kids going through a lot of things and I'm just seeing young felons that are not even born yet born in the community, already getting ready for prison.
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Numbers, man, and that's the thing that's sad, chuck.
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And if we sit in the school system or we sit in the educational system or we sit in our rehabilitation system for juveniles and we don't see that these kids are going to be our next inmates, incarcerated, and you can go home and it doesn't bother you, something's wrong, because if you're chasing the American dream on the misery of somebody else, then you are part of the capitalistic machine and that's the reality.
00:18:04.888 --> 00:18:06.890
And you ask me what could I do about it?
00:18:06.890 --> 00:18:19.393
You know it's about not being ignorant but being to the fact of understanding knowledge and accepting it and doing something about it, even if you just tell someone or just guide someone or just speak on it, you know.
00:18:19.393 --> 00:18:30.817
So that's the thing I'm passionate about, you know, and and um, I'm out here and I hope that I can give my life to educating people out of my ignorance, man, so they don't have to go down that same path.
00:18:30.817 --> 00:18:35.232
So so if the judgment begins with me, you know I was ignorant.
00:18:35.313 --> 00:18:45.157
I refused to listen to to applicable knowledge well, it's a new day and I love this quote which says the time is always right to do what is right.
00:18:45.157 --> 00:18:50.598
So I was right yeah, it's always right to do what is right, so it's like the time is now.
00:18:50.598 --> 00:18:58.988
So, having that passion, you know, whether you have a crowd of people seeing you or just two people seeing you, the time is always right to start.
00:18:59.028 --> 00:19:01.833
Now to walk in what you have a passion for.
00:19:01.833 --> 00:19:04.817
You know what I'm saying Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:19:04.837 --> 00:19:04.917
Yeah.
00:19:06.285 --> 00:19:16.907
You know, I tell you, man, when I speak, you know I'm speaking to myself and I'm not like, once again, I'm not saying I'm pointing someone to make them feel bad.
00:19:16.907 --> 00:19:21.590
I'm just speaking from my own ignorance, because I too am ignorant in some places.
00:19:21.590 --> 00:19:30.037
When I say that, I'm not speaking of negative connotations about me, but I'm talking about places of ignorance, out of places of darkness in my mind and thought.
00:19:30.037 --> 00:19:38.682
So sometimes, when we're faced with some things that don't add up, we start thinking about do we ignore it or do we refuse to believe this truth?
00:19:38.682 --> 00:19:41.275
And that's when the ignorance comes to part the play.
00:19:41.275 --> 00:19:46.811
Chuck, you know what I'm saying, and some people use that word ignorant to the point that that is a derogative term.
00:19:46.811 --> 00:19:52.415
But sometimes in ignorance we can make our biggest mistakes, and that's what's going on here in this country.
00:19:52.415 --> 00:20:00.757
Even the people on Capitol here, ignorant to what's going on, you know, to the people here in this country for those ignorant is not knowing something.
00:20:00.836 --> 00:20:02.138
It doesn't mean that you're stupid.
00:20:02.138 --> 00:20:04.208
It means that you don't have a knowledge of something.
00:20:04.208 --> 00:20:05.230
So let's make that clear.
00:20:05.230 --> 00:20:12.230
Yeah, it just means that you don't have the knowledge necessary to do a thing.
00:20:12.230 --> 00:20:13.253
That's right.
00:20:13.354 --> 00:20:25.797
Yeah, because I mean we all want to feel good about words we say and I know this is a self-help generation, but I'm just being real If your listeners say, hey, he said he was ignorant, hey, I'll be the first to admit there are some things I'm ignorant about.
00:20:25.896 --> 00:20:27.858
Yeah, you don't have a knowledge of some things.
00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:29.000
I don't have a knowledge of it.
00:20:29.000 --> 00:20:37.511
So those are just areas, man, that we can just better ourselves, and that doesn't mean that that's who we are.
00:20:37.531 --> 00:20:38.554
So I don't mean that in that text right here.
00:20:38.574 --> 00:20:41.880
I just want to make it clear to people who are listening yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:20:41.880 --> 00:20:47.589
But I'm just speaking of just not knowing so switching gears real fast, man.
00:20:47.650 --> 00:21:06.056
I heard something on Sunday and the pastor was talking about a text in the Bible where it talks to, I believe, hagar, and the angel stopped her and her baby, ishmael, and he asked where did you come from and where are you going?
00:21:06.056 --> 00:21:13.554
And I believe that was a powerful thing, because the way he put it was where did you come from?
00:21:13.554 --> 00:21:15.258
What did you deal with in your past?
00:21:15.258 --> 00:21:21.337
Because you can't go forward unless you look back and deal with that trauma that you just came from.
00:21:21.585 --> 00:21:22.386
You know what I'm saying.
00:21:22.847 --> 00:21:26.837
You can't you can't go forward unless you deal with that unaddressed trauma.
00:21:26.837 --> 00:21:29.433
So you say what did you come from and where are you going?
00:21:29.433 --> 00:21:43.834
Talk about that, man, because a lot of people are living, I believe, in that place where they're just traumatized and they haven't gone back and dealt with that unaddressed issues of the past.
00:21:43.834 --> 00:21:45.116
Can you talk about that?
