Why, Baltimore?

Why, Baltimore, do you sell drugs for pain and suffering? Drugs for stealing, drugs for sex, drugs for more drugs and money?

Why Baltimore, do you sell drugs to your children and have children selling your drugs?

Why, Baltimore, do you sell drugs to your pregnant women, to your women whom you abuse and get pregnant? To the babies in their addicted mothers who are born addicted?

Why, Baltimore, do you fill your streets with pain and poverty, AIDS and tragedy? Murders, suicides, overdoses and somewhere in between?

Why, Baltimore, do you foster racial hate, sex and gender hate and hate for no reason at all?

Why, Baltimore, do you fill your cold empty streets, your dirty and condemned row homes, your vacant and crumbling buildings with crackheads, addicts and the homeless?

That you helped create?

For those who were born into drugs. Those born into poverty. Those born into the streets.

For those abused by their loved ones, those abused for love. For all those lives ruined by all types of abuse.

For those that know nothing else. For those doing only what they know. For those using all they have ever experienced to stop their pain.

Find yourself out of the pain of the city.

Reach towards those that love you. Reach towards those that will always be there for you. Reach for those who gave you a chance.

Reach towards someone who has been there before. Reach for someone who has succeeded. Reach for someone clean from using, healed from hurting and working for something better.

Reach for those that want to help you. Reach for professionals who give their careers and lives to help you. Reach for programs, reach for churches, reach for caring and safe strangers.

Reach for change and don't give up. You will find yourself in a different city.