A Divine Dichotomy – By Lloyd Pate

I can consider myself a religious and a spiritual man. The religious aspect of me can be best compared to that of a religious extremist, because those within my network promoted nothing except our own beliefs, values, and ghetto moral fiber. We believed in our turf; we worshipped it. We cared nothing for society’s wants, hopes, needs and dreams simply because they never cared for any of our own.  Our distorted reality only aggravated these circumstances and we evolved to become volatile concoctions of mayhem and destruction- which ultimately insured that not only do we become a highly potential risk to the status quo and our own collective societies; we become victims to our own venomous, psychoactive selves.  This caste of young miscreants and hooligans that I describe has been classified as gang-members. They infect the population like the AIDS virus.

The inevitable outcome of this complex life-problem is simply death or prison. It has conditioned us to accept this grim truth. Death is the only collector that cannot be ducked and dodged. We recklessly have beckoned this entity that we have termed as Death. At one time or another, we’ve stared it in the eyes in heavy situations… and it blinked first. MY own reward for this transitory victory was being remanded to a county jail first hand, then ultimately sent to a Colorado prison for multiple years. (more…)