(ThyBlackMan.com) Recently, current Raiders receiver Henry Ruggs III made headlines for all the wrong reasons. He was involved in a DUI aka Driving Under Influence that took the life of another person in Las Vegas aka “America’s Playground”.
What’s ironic about Henry Ruggs III is that he played football at a high school that I attended in the mid-2000s in Lee High School and born and raised in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. Henry was an absolute dominant player in high school where he was at one time the second best high school football player in Alabama and after high school, he received over 20 football scholarships from big time universities across the country, but chose to play college football at one of the most prestigious college football programs across the country in The University Of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he won a national title in his freshman year.
Three years later, he makes a very very bad decision off the field that he and other black male athletes who make bad decisions off the field are very negatively judged by the general public and the mainstream media for while white male athletes who make similar mistakes off the field always are given the benefit of the doubt.
Henry Ruggs III arrest for DUI is another in a long line of examples of how negatively alcoholism can impact someone else’s life. For the past several decades now alcoholism has been and still continues to be one of the biggest vices that has plagued the black community where these studio/gimmick rappers in modern day mainstream media tell young black men like Ruggs to stay drunk all the time and that’s not a very healthy and productive way to live.
Alcoholism has been a generational curse to the black community and I can attest to that because I myself have a very long history with alcoholism in my family because when I was a kid and even a teenager, I remember my older brothers would frequently get drunk on dranking beer bottles of Bud, Bud Light, & Natty Light aka Natural Light to my grandmother who I absolutely loved so much, but the one thing I absolutely hated about her was the fact that she heavily abused alcohol during my childhood and teenage years so much to the point that it killed her many years ago. My grandmother’s alcohol abuse is the main reason why I became an urban edger which is a term I came up with to describe a black person like me who doesn’t do alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. Urban edger is the black version of straight edge basically.
I greatly respected my grandmother so much as well because she was the one that kept the family together especially during the worst period of my life in the early 1990s. I remember having a sit down conversation with her on one particular afternoon in which she revealed how her history with alcoholism came about which she told me that she was married to this one guy who was a complete loser for not caring too much for their kids because whenever he got paid, he always spent it up on alcohol and doing absolutely nothing to provide for their kids and she was working a few jobs to make ends meet and provide for their kids and the guy’s alcohol abuse got so bad that she not only divorced him, but it sent her on a downward spiral with alcoholism.
Dranking too much alcohol causes memory loss, more aggressive behavior, more violent prone, greater chance of potentially hurting someone especially someone you love and trust me, I have personally seen it all through the years.
PSA: If you wanna live a healthy and productive lifestyle, stay far away from alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.
The Conclusion – The reason why I wrote this article is to educate and inform readers about the dangers of alcoholism in the black community and how you can avoid becoming an alcoholic like I managed to avoid becoming one by being an urban edger instead.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)