The Rejection of Family and Fortune

For my entire life, I have looked up to my father. I have wanted to be just like him, as every boy does. When my father died, though I was grief stricken, I was also eager to take over the family business.

Well, yesterday, I got to be just like my father, and I was shocked to learn that everything that I thought I knew throughout my entire life had been fabricated and sugarcoated. I realized that I had known nothing about who my father really was, what he had done, or even what the family business dealt with. I never knew that our customers’ lives were destroyed by our business. Our customers are weak and desperate, they rely on our products just to be somewhat content with life. When I went to observe the work of the dealers, I saw a woman stumbling towards us. She was twitching, she had black teeth, bloodshot eyes, and had deep wrinkles despite only looking like she was in her thirties. When she got to the line, she was begging to get ahead.  I couldn’t believe that my family business had been turning people into zombies for generations. I never knew that the products we traded led to mountains of dead bodies.  When I was on the job, I saw a member of the coast guard approach the ship I was on, to ask some questions. I was shocked when one of my employees shot him in the back. I watched as the blood drenched his uniform and he fell to the ground with a permanent look of surprise on his face. I thought about how this officer probably had a family, a wife, children, and parents that would never see him again. Many of our own people have lost their lives in the name of our company’s profit. Jorge Gonzales, one of my longest serving employees, and a friend of my father’s was shot dead yesterday. I doubt that I will ever recover from seeing the man whom I had known so well as a child riddled with bullets, and I realized in that moment that he had lost his life because of my company.

Many of you standing here listening to my speech have put your lives at risk trying to eliminate our business rivals. I ask all of you whether providing for your family is worth the risk of never being able to see them again.  I assure you that your family would rather have you in their lives than the money you earn. I don’t know what to think of my father anymore. Am I thankful for the fact that he raised me and inspired me throughout my childhood, or do I despise him for lying, sugarcoating, and fabricating the details of the family business? Now that I am a fully grown man and have seen what it is my father was actually doing to provide for my family. I have decided to leave the family business.

To my family, I know that all of you are disappointed in me. You think that I am disgracing the family by abandoning the long lived family business. Believe me, I thought long and hard about this decision, I stayed up all of last night thinking about what I observed on my first day. I was not eager to put an end to everything my father had started, or to dishonor the family name, but I decided that staying true to what I believe was more important. Though I’ve wanted to be a drug lord since I knew what jobs were, I realize now that all of my dreams, aspirations, and fantasies about my future were all lies.