Eulogy - For Rasheem Civil

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Some people believe that there are more than two ways to fulfill happiness and sadness. However, I believe that there are only two ways for the expression of feelings. One is happiness and the other is sadness. For those who knew Rasheem, they may see him as just a person. Due to his short life span, the person who I grew to know as a young man dreamt of many successes. But his feelings, motivations, accomplishments, achievements, and himself as a person are what I greatly admire about him.

When I first met Rasheem it was on a basketball court. That was when I realized that he was a big fan of Ray Allen and so was I. From that day on I took a special interest in him because of the loneliness that we shared. As we grew together I learned many things about Rasheem, as much as he learned about me. He appeared to be very pleased and quiet at times and he seemed to be in a slight depressive state most of the times.

My most missed memory with Rasheem was senior prom of 2006. I still remember when he had asked me to have the last dance with him. I never saw him so peaceful. It was a night that we both wish could have never ended. During the times we spent together we shared some private secrets with each other. I learned that he had no family or relatives that he could depend on. This isolation reminds me of myself three years ago. He mentioned the struggle that he endured daily, the frustrations, the pain, the loneliness, the abandonment, and the courage that prevented him from failing.

He will be greatly missed and I will never forget him as long as I live. There are only a handful of people that walk into your life and change it forever. He had a great effect on me but due to his life being cut short he couldn’t become the man he is destined to be. The most valuable times that we spent together were when I learned about his experiences of sadness. It was the first time that I had met a young adult who actually explained his anger, his depression, and his ambition to learn.

Rasheem was abandoned by his parents at the age of 11. That was when he started to do odd jobs in the neighborhood and he slept in cars for survival. He worked two jobs while he was in high school. He still managed to stay in school on his own and that’s the passion that drove me into his life. With the help of a friend from one of the odd jobs that he had worked offered him a place to stay. This is one of the reasons why this poem reminds me of my best friend:

“God saw he was at his happiest and
Someone would not let that be
So he put his arms around him and whispered
Come with me
With tear filled eyes I watched him
Suffer and fade away. Although I
Love him deeply. I could not
Make him stay
A golden heart stopped beating
Hard working hands put to rest
God broke my heart to prove to me
He only takes the best!”


Rasheem knew God exists but because he struggled so much he had doubts of whether or not he should believe in him. In spite, of all this, he never stopped trying, and he achieved some of his greatest desires. He graduated from 8th grade, from 12th grade, and he was actively enrolled in college before he passed. My friend Rasheem, I will always admire and I will always respect his dignity and his passion for learning, and his motivation for life.

We Need a Resolution - By Toniesha Benthall

“You can be anything you want if you set you mind to it!” This has been the golden line fed to youth for decades which is used to nurture the youth’s hopes and dreams. But what America doesn’t show or tell us is the trials and tribulations that we have to go through in order to grasp what is in reach. Yet we have to find out by enduring these tribulations and as a result of that, some people become discouraged.

Let me just state that anyone who’s never resided in poverty has no place to judge and has no room to point and laugh at such a horrific epidemic. And to anyone who is enduring poverty, it does not give them the permission to rest on their rear end and make excuses for why their life isn’t progressing. Blaming “the man’ has never gotten us poor people anywhere or anything, so what should that propel us to do? As we would say, “get up and go for ours.”

Obviously people do not wish or want to be poor but they do choose whether or not they will remain in that predicament or try to rise above that predicament. Society does however facto into these unfortunate mishaps as well, though they are not the total blame.

When it comes to laying employees off, providing communities with trifling protective services, and so on, society, government etc. are the culprits. They are the dominators and have the authority to shut people out of the so called “American dream.” Urban areas, or more blunt, the ghettos are treated as if they do not exist on the face of this Earth which is one of the number one reasons for high crime rates. Poverty means lack of service and care, from both partied (residents and government), and this is why so many communities are tormented.

Now it is up to us who are in these situations to take a stand and care for our community if no one else will. Unfortunately, not everyone has that type of mind set and will sit back and accept such atrocities and refuse to try and progress which make us just as wrong and guilty.

Welfare, food stamps, section eight, and all of these other appeasements for the less fortunate are why people inadvertently are lazy. The purpose of these programs were to help the poor get on their feet and take their life from there but now the lazy poor are getting a hold of these appeasements and are taking advantage. They have the mind set that if welfare, food stamps, etc. are what I need to get by and comes for free, then why should I waste my time finding legitimate work? That is a very understandable but a simple minded mind set.

This all boils down to everyone coming together to get school attendance in outstanding numbers, more people employed, and less babies being born into poverty. Everyone from poor people, to the government, and even wealthy people should come together. It’ll take all of us to bring this poverty epidemic to a halt because no one should have to endure such a way of living. Instead of America spending millions and billions of dollars to go to war and destroy another country for our own personal gain, we should spend that money to renovate this country which is engulfed in its own destruction. Prominent leaders such as Oprah, Don Cheadle, and others should start with assembling schools in this country first. And instead of us poor people wasting the hard earned or little money that we do have on the lottery, we should put that money into a bank account and make life for the future offspring somewhat finer.

I live without cash – and I manage just fine

Mark Boyle outside his off-grid caravan. Photograph: Mark Boyle

Armed with a caravan, solar laptop and toothpaste made from washed-up cuttlefish bones, Mark Boyle gave up using cash

In six years of studying economics, not once did I hear the word "ecology". So if it hadn't have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi in the final term of my degree, I'd probably have ended up earning a fine living in a very respectable job persuading Indian farmers to go GM, or something useful like that. The little chap in the loincloth taught me one huge lesson – to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Trouble was, I had no idea back then what that change was.

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even "ethical business" would never be quite enough, an afternoon's philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world's issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we're completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn't waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn't contaminate it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I'd use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I'd relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it's not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don't own a plasma screen TV, people think you're an extremist.

People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.

Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community