A try to help my Little Brother find positive voluntary associations. I encourage him to volunteer at his local church, and to seek afterschool enrichment programs and tutoring. But this is not always easy. He often says that he feels that people do not care -- his teachers, his parents, and even his friends who try to uphold a 'straight and narrow' path. He also says that he wants to feel as if he is accepted by other people, and sometimes his drive to feel accepted right now is more powerful than pursuing long-range goals and the promise getting into college, of 'making it' in a larger American social context. I try to provide a positive role model for him, but it can be difficult to describe to him that sometimes you need to get through the present to move into the future, when many of the images of the...
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