What is your life worth, here’s $20, is that enough?

 Twenty Dollar Bill

What value do you place on your life? How about $20? That is what one young woman threw her life away for when she decided to fight a friend over $20 she had loaned to her. An article titled “A $20 Loan, a Facebook Quarrel and a Fatal Stabbing” by Al Baker and Tim Stelloh May 2, 2011 and published in the New York Times details the incident.

This argument between these two friends, who happened to be young black women, escalated because one of them made a loan of $20 dollars to the other on the premise that the recipient of the loan would purchase diapers for her young child. The friend that loaned the funds discovered that the money was used for something else and became angry and expressed that anger on Facebook and ended with a promise to settle the matter in person. That in-person confrontation ended up with the lender of the funds dead from a stab wound. She lost her life over $20.

In reality this young woman did not die over $20, she died from something that happens all too often today in the black community among young people, too much bravado. According to the article, the woman who got the loan stated that she did not thug on Facebook and would do it in person and the other friend said we will see. Now you have a setup on a social network where all of their friends can see the argument taking place. Now the stage is set for the confrontation to take place or for one of them to lose face and face embarrassment. Take into account that the lender was 22 years old and the loan recipient was 18.

In the final analysis the 22-year old went to the 18-year old woman’s apartment and the confrontation end with a fatal stab wound to the chest, from a kitchen knife, of the young woman that loaned her friend $20. This is a sad situation, but lives have been lost over footwear, wheels on automobiles and other material items that some have deemed worthwhile to take a life to obtain. I don’t know what that $20 really meant to the young woman that was stabbed, but it was not worth her life.

What is your life worth, here’s $20, is that enough?