WE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD WITH THE STORIES WE TELL.

MADE WITH LOVE IN SUNNY LOS ANGELES. 100% COTTON. WASH COLD, TUMBLE DRY LOW. DO NOT BLEACH. DO NOT IRON.

Gashes have healed and blood has long-since dried, but scars will always remain. Across my back and upon my face, mine once lived as bitter childhood reminders. They epitomized my adversity, especially the one below my right eye. It is two inches vertical and a quarter of an inch wide. To this day I am still unable to grow facial hair there, and it remains a gaping conversation piece. But while scars will always remain, their significance has the ability to change. I have come to realize that people are a lot like scars.

Today, I manage a business just like my father did. The only difference is that I am an educated man, and I am successful. Many have said that if it were not for my upbringings I may never have understood the significance of pain, and furthermore would not have succeeded. “Pain,” they say, “is a paradox, for while it hurts, in the end it makes us better able to understand life.” Scars can stand as symbols of misery, but they can also become emblems of new perspective. People, like scars, can stand for something different; they can stand for something greater.

And so I realize that many have acted to impoverish in naivety, while others have swung with full intent: from the callowness of children to men frothing with malignity. But does not the same wash of darkened sky fall eventually upon every man? Does not the rain inevitably dampen, and does not trust so painfully break in us all? If, then, it is true that poverty is a plague that resides in humanity--if pain is a product of fractured relationship--then bullies are brothers with scars in desperate need of alleviation. Bullies can never win for, like us, bullies are simply broken men.