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"Who Shot Johnny?": A Portrait of Youth Violence Essay

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Who Shot Johnny?

As humans we strive to live in a utopian environment, free of elements of aggression, greed, and violence. Most of us try to live a healthy and satisfying life, gaining from opportunities that we have sought and worked hard for. We take life as it comes, and we accept the challenges and difficulties that life puts out as we continue on no matter how hard it gets. However, there are a multitude of people who tend to think that life is just too hard and that they should be handed everything on a silver platter. Greed and violence begin to factor into their life as they continue in their set ways. They think that the world should revolve around their every need and that life is unbearably hard and unjustly unfair. These…show more content…
In Debra Dickerson's essay "Who Shot Johnny?" she makes it a point to declare that who ever shot her nephew Johnny isn't someone that she has never encountered before. This person is not unlike many of the other negative people in this world, in fact this person can be effectively categorized as a negative trait in itself. Debra Dickerson says:

"When the call came, my first thought was the same on I'd had when I'd heard about Rosa Parks's beating: a brother did it. A non-job-having, middle-of-the-day malt-liquor-drinking, crotch-clutching, loud-talking brother with many neglected children born of many forgotten women. He lives in his mother's basement with furniture rented at an astronomical interest rate, the exact amount of which he does not know. He has a car phone, an $80 monthly cable bill and every possible phone feature but no savings. He steals Social Security numbers from unsuspecting relatives and assumes their identities to acquire large TV sets for which he will never pay. (234)

Dickerson realizes that this person isn't a person that is new to the world, instead this is a person who has plagued Dickerson and her family as well as the rest of the world. This is the person whom has tried their hardest to control everything and make life a living shit hole for everyone else living alongside them. Dickerson also writes, "We know him. We've known and feared him all our
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