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| This article requires pre-publication review by an uninvolved reviewer (one not substantially involved in writing the article). –Article last amended: Mar 14 at 16:01:34 UTC (history) |
Friday, March 14, 2025
As I sat in my desk at work today at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, looking at about 18 inmates walking around me waiting to be given instruction or sent to go and fix a plumbing issue or some other several problems that occurs in inmate living area on a daily basis. It makes me ponder what could have been for these folks if reading was made a priority in their home. Yes, reading. You may want to ask what difference that could have made. The answer is simple for me. Reading is the reason why I have a chance to be sitting on this desk in the first place. I remembered very well my first experience with book, it was not when I was a child, I was a teenager when my dad bought me my very first book by William Shakespeare. Though at the time the English language in it was written in it had a lot hardness to it. My dad was not a man that cares how you feel about something, if he ask you to do something, you just do it so I was literally forced to read that book as a 13 year old.
My most impactful book was however handed to me when I graduated secondary school same as high school equivalent in America as a 16 year old, my dad called me into the room late in the evening and said this three sentences to me, I do not have money to send you to a university, You will be going to a 3 year vocational technical college and he handed me a book titled Think and Grown Rich by [Hill]. That single act by my dad changed the trajectory of my life and made me fall in love with book ever since. I have in fact made reading of that book mandatory at least once a year to always remind myself of the importance and the power of my mind.
As most people say or belief that the arrival of social media is a curse and is also a blessing but it is all about our perspective. I have read many articles on the impact of reading and how the absence of it is affecting our culture and community in today’s world. A lot of our young men and women cannot read a book for 10 minutes without getting frustrated or uninterested and the place I am now while writing this article is where most of them end up and it is getting even worse.
