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Doing the Right Thing
by Mayra Ramirez
Mayra is a student at 826 Valencia.
If I could go back to when it all happened, I would choose to not be there at all. In that moment, I felt sad because he was just a young man stealing and showing no respect for his fellow human beings. At the same time, I was worried about him and wondered why he did it. My story is about how the world has changed, and how it is still changing everyday. It was one of the moments in my life in which I felt disappointed about how we make this world work.
One day, I was waiting at the bus stop. I was bored, so I took my cell phone out and started to play with it. A young man stopped his bicycle in front of me. He was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans, but I don’t remember his face. I remember that I wasn’t afraid of him. I never thought he would do anything to me. I was just messaging with my friends.
After a few minutes, I caught the man looking at me and my cell phone. All of a sudden, he passed in front of me and took my cell phone. The battery of the phone dropped to the ground, and in that moment I thought, What is going on? I was confused, scared, and worried that my mom would get mad at me for losing my cell phone. I ran to grab my battery and noticed that the man had come back to take that too. Then he said, “Hey, give me the battery.”
I said, “No, this is my cell phone!” and I thought, Why does he need my battery? That is my cell phone.
Then he said, “Hey! I need it, give it to me,” like it belonged to him. I felt offended because it was mine. He took it from me.
I kept saying, “Hey, please give it back to me, please! Give me the battery, I need it!”
But he refused to do it. In his eyes, I saw that he was scared. I looked at him, but he never looked at me-—he was looking at the street, and I saw he was scared. After the small amount of time I spent with him, I pitied him. I said the magic words: “Please give me my cell phone. I know that you are not that bad. I know you feel something, please!”
Then he took the cell phone, looked at me, and said, “OK.” He gave the cell phone back to me, got on his bicycle, and disappeared down the street. I think he gave me back the cell phone because he wanted someone to say that to him, because nobody had ever said that to him or believed in him, and it made him feel like the good person that he could be. Or maybe he felt sad for doing something wrong, and he knew he would feel guilty. I felt scared, sad, and mad, but also like a hero, because I stopped him from doing something wrong. When the bus came, I got on and never looked back. Now, I don’t even remember his face and I hope to never see him again. But if I did see him again, I would have only two questions for him: Why would you do something like that? And why did you give me back the cell phone? I thought about what our differences might be, thinking that the biggest would be our lifestyles.
I am from Puebla, Mexico, a little town where all the people know each other. In my country, people are very conservative. Since I was a child, my parents have taught me how to try to be nice to others. If someone was carrying heavy bags, I should help them and carry some. And there is a strong tradition of saying “Good morning” to all the elders and treating them with respect. Here in the United States, I just say “Good morning” to my family, not to every elderly person in the street. In Puebla, if you see your family members across the street, you must go and greet them. The people are much friendlier and more respectful with others. I felt safe there because everyone knew what to do. When I came here, I realized there were a lot of people who never say “hi” in the street, or they yell strange things instead.
There was another time when I was waiting for the bus, and an older man said, “Hi, how are you? Can you give me your phone number?” And I said “no” and started to walk away from the man, and he just stayed there. I thought, Oh my God, you are the same age as my father, and you are saying that to me? That’s disrespectful.I would have never had that experience in my country, in my town. People are respectful there. Only classmates asked me for my number, and that was OK because they were my age.
Anybody can get robbed and it happened to me. That day, I started to think about how an innocent person’s bad circumstances can make them a criminal. What factors make a person disrespectful? Someone without respect for humans, for themselves, for life? One of the most important influences on the human life is family. Everything starts with the family. The world of a baby is its family. When you’re born, you start as neither a good, nor a bad person. If you don’t receive lessons from your family on how to be a good person, then it will be difficult for you to learn it from the streets or from your friends. In your house, your parents can make you a kind person for the future or a person who will make bad decisions.
I agree with the thoughts of my mom. She says that a good person can come from a bad family. A guest came into class and he talked to us about his life. He is a man who had been living with domestic violence since he was little. He made bad decisions that got him sent to jail. Inside jail, he started writing. When he got out of jail, he tried to change his life, and he is now a good person. It was hard for him because he didn’t have any support from his family in staying out of trouble. He changed his decisions. No one else forced him to change his way of life.
It takes a long time to change from bad to good after trouble. This could take a whole lifetime. It doesn’t happen instantly, because people have to learn the right way to treat other people, and they might make a lot of mistakes before they become better people.
If the person who gives you life treats you badly, or makes you feel like human trash, or like you don’t deserve to live, other people could do the same. You might accept all the bad treatment, feeling like you deserve to be treated like that. This is why the world of a child must be healthy, with caring, affection, attention, and other important things to survive emotionally.
Do the right thing with others and apply the Golden Rule. Children are like sponges, absorbing everything around them.
They respect you if you respect them. If you don’t, they could treat people like they themselves expect to be treated. They could learn bad things in the streets, steal things, disrespect people, be violent, and fill the world with their selfish violence.
Some children grow up without money, but their parents make them understand that even though they are poor, their family can still be happy and teach principles such as humility, responsibility, solidarity, respect, and tolerance. We need people with these traits to make society better.
People’s morals must be instilled early by their families, because then they will never forget them and will use them for the rest of their lives. Many people think that school is where people learn disrespect, but I don’t agree with that. That could be an important factor, but not the exact reason. The reason is because we act the same at school as we do at our house. If our parents let us act with disrespect in our home, than we will do the same at school. But if our parents teach us respect for life and other people, we will take that with us to school. I think that in school, we practice our principles and adopt some of them from other people, but we have to be aware of the people who we might meet who have different points of view. Those kinds of people can confuse us and make us act differently. We cannot let them change who we are.
My mom was the main person who taught me how to accept and love myself. She loves me and teaches me by her example. She has always told me that I’m a very valuable person—not because I’m her daughter, but because I’m a person with feelings. She told me that I have to keep the good comments for myself, that the negative comments will just make me feel bad and won’t help me grow as a person.
If people could accept who they are and what they have, it would be easier for me to relate to them. Acceptance means being proud of yourself and loving yourself. When you accept yourself, you will have self-respect and higher self-esteem. If you respect yourself, you can accept people without seeing their skin color or their nationality. You would just accept them, and at the same time, others would accept and respect you.
I experienced acceptance when I came to the United States. In the first months I was living in South Lake Tahoe—-a beautiful place, but also a place where a lot of white people live. In my school, more than half the students were white. There were no other races, just whites and Latinos. In one of my classes, a friend and I were the only two Latino people in a class full of white people. I remember how the white kids were always trying to make me feel accepted or included. I felt excluded because of me, not because they were trying to make me feel uncomfortable. They never said anything to me about my skin color or about my accent. Sometimes we create our own limits, not the people around us.
When I lived in Lake Tahoe, I met a boy who was very friendly. He was always trying to talk to me in Spanish. He drew me a lot of funny faces on my paper when we were in class together. With my help, he was learning more and more Spanish. He was the person who made me feel most accepted in that world. This experience helped me to love myself even more. When I came to San Francisco, I felt like a better person, like I could do anything that I wanted to do.
The most important thing that I learned from him was that we can include different types of people in our lives. It doesn’t matter if we speak the same language; it only matters if we want new friends. Maybe in his life, he moved to a new place and people did the same thing for him that he did for me. In the future, I will do the same with new girls or boys in my school. It is important to be conscious of what we do and what we can change.
Many people who come to the United States are affected by whether or not they feel accepted. You can feel the situation getting worse every day as people come to the United States. They miss their country, their family, their language, their culture, and the people who make them feel accepted. I know people who have lived here for many years and still don’t speak English. This situation not only happens to Latinos, but also to people from other countries. The question is, how are we helping these new people feel welcome?
In these times, we don’t know who to trust. Kind people are few. The world is full of hate. We need to have respect for each other; we have to learn how to respect before we can have good relationships with people in society. But sadly, the number of people without principles is increasing. Each day, we lose a little of our principles because of the way society is. I don’t think this is because of the president or because of the rest of the country. We make up the country, and we choose the president. I could be unfair and say that the president is responsible for my mistakes. The president can inspire many children, but he can’t live our lives.
Your relationships in society are important, because you can’t live alone. Someday you could need someone’s help. You never know if you will be in the same situation. How will you act? Will you do the right thing? Will you be kind? These are important questions to think about. You have the choice to treat others as you wish to be treated. I miss the boy from Lake Tahoe, and I have good memories of him. I wish I could speak to him again. I wish that I could go back and be his friend, because he was kind to everyone just because he wanted to be nice. He was a model person. From him, I learned to be accepting of others even if you don’t speak the same language or share the same nationality.
I don’t have bad wishes for the boy on the bike, because he had his reasons for taking my phone. I want to ask him why he gave me back my cell phone and what was in his mind when I said, “I know that you are not that bad. I know you feel something.” My experience helps me to be a better person every day. When someone gives you kindness, you have to respond the same way, and you will love feeling better about yourself. The choice is yours.
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