Interview with Will
Will: I’ve lived in Chicago all my life…It changed a lot—they gotta just stop, put the guns down, you know? Help your family out. That’s all. Stop all the violence—we don’t need no violence right now. Too much stuff going on these streets, especially with these young kids getting killed these days, innocent people. It happened a lot in my life, so you know the one thing we’ve got to do is just change. Ain’t nothing wrong with change. People, places, things—we need to change them things sometimes. Life don’t come to you itself. People just got to understand, you’ve got one life to live, and you gotta enjoy it. Me being at my age—I’m gonna be 30, I’m 29 right now—so you know that’s what keeps me up. God’s what wakes me up every morning…and that’s a good thing. Ain’t never no bad thing when you wake up in the morning—that’s a good thing.
I’ve been going to this church my whole life. It’s been a big, big impact. There’s been a lot of stuff happening around here in this Lawndale community. They gotta think sometimes and realize it’s not good for this stuff to be going on in the streets of Chicago. We’ve gotta wake up every day of the morning and realize ‘hey, look this is not what I want to do.’ If you fight through the pain and the struggles, good things gonna happen to you. I had to realize that and be like ‘the streets ain’t for me right now, I’ve got to do something else.’ Since I’ve been a kid this neighborhood has changed a whole lot.
Stop being angry all the time, because anger ain’t gonna get you nowhere, stress not gonna get you nowhere. People die from stress, people die from anger—people end up in jail from anger, people end up dead because of anger. No, it ain’t about that. And I had to wake up and realize…me being a child growing up in the streets of Chicago; and thank God that I’m here to this day right now.
bioGraph: Do you have a favorite Chicago intersection?
Will: Ain’t no favorite street corner, I just like Chicago.
