Damon West

You've become institutionalized and your eggshell has swastikas all over it.

Then he asked me the question, Mick.

He said, what about the coffee bean, West?

He said, what happened to the coffee bean in the pot of boiling water?

And Mick, I didn't have an answer for him on that one.

I didn't know what happened to a coffee bean in a pot of boiling water.

And that is when Muhammad, this man who looks nothing like me, this man who doesn't come from the same America that I came from, this man who doesn't believe the same things I believe in my life,

This is a black Muslim man from the streets of Dallas.

I'm a white middle-class Christian from a little town called Port Arthur.

But this man who is so different than me, he's going to share with me one of the most important and transformational messages I've ever received in my entire life.

And the message there is this.

If you ever shut yourself off to people because of their differences, different race, different gender, different ethnicity, different religion, opinions, different political views, if you close yourself off to people because of their differences, you could miss some of the most important lessons and some of the best friendships in this life.

Because Muhammad told me that day.

He said, if I put a coffee bean in that same pot of boiling water we call prison, he said, now you're going to change the name of the water to coffee.

Because he said the coffee bean, West, the smallest of the three things, small like you, had the power to change the entire atmosphere inside that pot because the power was inside the coffee bean.

He said, just like the power is inside of you.

And that's what he told me, Mick, if you want to turn this thing around, if you want to if you want to change yourself inside that prison, you've got to be like that coffee bean to the last words you ever said to me.

He said, hey, West, be a coffee bean.

And that was it.

The prison bus came to pick me up that day in 2009.