Rose of Success

Why is a rose considered beautiful? A rose is considered beautiful because of its vibrant petals, its dark green leaves, the brown thorns. The fuzz on its red pedals that make it feel like the softest velvet you've ever felt. Imagine a rose growing through concrete, amazing wouldn't It be? What makes a successful person whom came up from the ghetto any different? Both should be admired equally for the hard work that was put to get to their destination.

Tupac Shakur spoke about a rose growing through concrete and compared it to someone coming up, "So why is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side." Here he says that no matter where you end up people will always look at your past, at your scars, and all you can do is accept it. He questions why a rose and a person can't be valued the same when they worked just as hard, to get to a certain point, despite the leaning and the scars. He then says, "You can't even see that I've come up from out of that." He uses himself as an example of this, he uses this line to say he had to work twice as hard, even when he got to the top to not be considered any less than any other artist. 

He used juxtaposition to bring to mind the image of a beautiful flower and a kid from the "ghetto" to highlight a much larger meaning, that these, both the rose and the kid, have worked twice as hard to get to were they got and have to be appreciated much more because of how hard it was. For example he says, "If you walked by a street and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete." If you'd seen a rose growing in a garden it wouldn't have been as respected as the rose that grew through the concrete. He's using symbolism to show the hard work that people have to go through to get somewhere, much more people of color. This is something that most kids at Lincoln including myself can identify with, we have to work twice as hard to even be recognized, and sometimes we don't even get that recognition, because we're from the "ghetto". Artist like Tupac are our inspirations to have the dedication and the motivation to get to the American Dream.