Ethical Dilemmas

Listen, I'm not proud of everything. Back in the day, I thought loyalty was the only thing that mattered. If your crew got hit, you hit back. If someone messed with your block, you made sure they knew who owned it. I used to say, "Protecting mine is the only code I need." Then came the night we hit that corner store. Not for the money—just to scare some new kids off our turf. I was the one who pushed the guy holding the register down, yelling, "This is ''our'' corner!" But the kid behind the counter? He was just a kid, scared. I didn’t think about it. I just thought, ''This is how we keep the peace''. Next morning, the news said a kid got shot in the crossfire. Mateo. He was 14. I’d seen him at the park, playing soccer with his little sister. I’d ''known'' him. And I’d been the one who told the crew, "Don’t worry about the clerk—he’s just a clerk." I’d covered it up. Said it was "accident." That’s when the truth hit me like a brick. I’d been protecting ''myself''—my reputation, my spot in the crew—not the people I claimed to protect. I’d used "loyalty" to justify hurting someone who didn’t deserve it. The ethical dilemma wasn’t about ''who'' I was protecting. It was about ''what'' I was willing to do to keep the illusion of control. I spent months drowning in that shame. But here’s what I learned: Ethics aren’t about who you claim to protect. They’re about ''how'' you protect them. You can’t say "I’m doing this for my family" while making someone else’s family mourn. Now? I run a program where we talk about that moment. Not to shame kids, but to show them: The hard truth isn’t "You messed up." It’s "You can’t fix a broken thing by breaking more things." I tell them, "You’re not too far gone. But you gotta stop lying to yourself about why you’re hurting people." The path out isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about choosing, every single day, to protect people ''without'' breaking them. ''— Francisco Meyer, walking a different path''