One thing about growing up in a rough neighborhood is that a lot of things happens to you and luckily for me, I’m on the perfect platform to tell everyone here some of those things.
In the movies, when we see someone in a situation where a gun is being pointed at them, the first thing that comes to our mind is for the person to snatch the gun away or do some really cool moves to avoid getting shot but the truth is that it’s not really the same thing in reality.
In most cases, majority of us would be frozen with fear and even if the guy holding the gun gets distracted for a little bit, we still would probably just be standing right in front of him doing nothing to save ourselves because of fear.
A couple of years ago, a riot broke out in a university very close to where we lived. The student of that school were known to go violent whenever there was a little protest or misunderstanding in the school so when we heard that they were having a protest, we knew trouble was coming but we just didn’t expect it to come to our street where my mom’s shop was.
They all entered the street unexpectedly and before we knew what was happening there were bikes carelessly speeding down the road with two or three people on it. I was inside of our house with my mom while her neighbor hid inside her shop as we watched them display all sort of craziness before zooming off.
It took about fifteen minutes or thereabout before the last one of them drove past and that was when we came out to find my mom’s neighbor shaking on the floor in her shop. When we got close to her, we called her name and the look we saw on her face when she raised up her head was nothing but pure fear. Apparently, one of the guys on the bike had pointed a guy at her before they drove off and she had remained on that floor shaking even after they were long gone.
And the thought of that now just made me realize how powerful fear is. A lot of people would say fear is bad but the truth is, sometimes fear saves us too.