Starting Life At Minus Zero Mel Carter
[Music]
so i came here to talk about something
called
minus zero minus zero has nothing to do
with the weather
it’s really kind of like how i started
my life
and how most inner city kids started
their life
and i didn’t realize it until i was an
adult
and i got a little bit of success and i
realized
how far i came from and i wasn’t just
i didn’t have a level playing field
i grew up in a neighborhood where you
could get shot
walking outside i grew up in a
neighborhood where
everything was just up friends
killed friends
sometimes we ain’t got no lights
sometimes we ain’t got money for food
so i looked at it like damn i’m not even
starting at zero i’m starting it
minus zero and all the things he just
said i accomplished was even so much
harder because
i started at minus zero and i kept going
with that
kept going with it minus zero every time
i would go speak somewhere i would say
minus zero minus zero and i feel so good
that i accomplished something that came
so far
and i went back to my country where i
was born in trinidad
and i was sitting in a group with about
five kids
and i was telling my mind a zero story
and i said you know i grew up this way i
grew up that way things was bad some
days we ain’t have food
and kid said to me he said
damn your minus zero sounds like a plus
ten to me
and i was like what what you mean by
that
and he said some days you ain’t have
food every day i gotta scramble for food
i’m 16 and i’ve been shot
one of my friends got killed last week
and i’m now i think he was maybe in the
10th grade he had lost about four
friends
mother died father died
and damn my minus zero story just kind
of became like
maybe right maybe i did start at plus
so i started just looking for people
meeting people everywhere i traveled
started thinking about like kids in
haiti kids in africa
kids all over the world and i wanted to
hear a
minus zero story and i met a lot of
people and heard a minus zero story
and unfortunately i heard a minor zero
story as an adult
and they was still at minus zero
and that’s when i realized how hard it
was
to get out from minus zero
and very few people do it
very few people do it just like
there’s a whole another crowd that
started plus ten
there’s some rich kids started plus ten
started plus five and very few of them
end up homeless end up on drugs
end up in jail end up getting shot
very very few of them because they
started at plus 10
and when you start so high most of the
times it’s so hard to fall down
so when you start so low most of the
times
it’s so hard to go up
so i just really wanted to come and i
wanted to make this short
and kind of remind everybody that we all
got a minus zero story
and no matter what you feel like
sometimes your minus zero story
is somebody else’s plus ten
and that’s really all i came to say
tonight