I wake up every morning to the smell of freshly cut green grass, a view of a white picket fence, a nice sunny day, and many new faces to see from every culture and ethnic background. Drive or walk around the corner and you’ll be at a big beautiful park where kids and their parents laugh and play and on the basketball court a game of pick-up 5 on 5 going on drawing a really big crowd because of how intense the game gets. Drive a little farther into the city going downtown where all the exotic and retro clubs, restaurants, our brand new Golden 1 Center arena where the Sacramento Kings play, but what draws the most attention is our big white capitol standing as our centerpiece showing unity. Every year  during the summertime you can go down to Cal Expo for the annual State Fair where many people from everywhere come just to experience what is normal for me, but extravagant to them with all the rides, foods, performances, and just to have a great time. You can also go right next to the fair and get wet at the amazing water park Raging Waters along with being able to watch a horse race and even a Sacramento Republic soccer game on Bonney Field.  All these activities are great especially under the wonderful Sacramento weather, which to me isn’t all that great all the time because of the hot, humid, sweaty summer days to the windy, cloudy, sometimes rainy winter days. All this greatness is possible with the very multicultural background of Sacramento allowing us to have many different foods, clothing, religions, and and mostly different people.

Ok ok I’m going to be honest…. Sacramento isn’t all that great, “in fact, to me” it’s pretty horrible.`Everyday, everywhere, and at any time somebody is about to or has just been shot for little things from drugs and gang violence to a simple misunderstanding. Yeah Sacramento has it’s ups that are shown, but for every up there’s a down and Sacramento downs usually end up with somebody dead and somebody in jail. Daily it’s a scare whether somebody like me, a youth African-American male, will make it home at night because of all the gang violence, police brutality, and more importantly a wrong place wrong time situation. If you look up Sacramento it’ll show you these nice beautiful places, but what they don’t show are places like Meadowview, Oak Park, Highlands, the Heights, those kinds of places where it’s nothing, but shootouts, drug dealing, and homeless people on every corner and at every gas station. The little nice parks and nice houses you would see in a Sacramento ad if you were to go through my neighborhood, Meadowview, you won’t see none of that it’s all wore down and raggedy with graffiti on everything, gang members posted on the play structure, and the scent of marijuana with Swisher wrappers in the grass and wood chips. There are some newer more nicer houses in Meadowview now, but that doesn’t protect them from anything it actually makes them a bigger target for a group of people to run in and clear the whole house of everything. In my neighborhood nobody is safe and everybody has to struggle pretty much to get there’s.

Sacramento has it all from the good and the bad and no matter what to me Sacramento will forever be home.