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What Is The Conflict In The Other Wes Moore

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In Wes Moore’s 2010 book “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates,” two men with the same name, born blocks apart who are raised in an identical poverty and drug plagued neighborhood are examined. What author Wes Moore discovers in his conversations with inmate Wes Moore, is that their lives were remarkably similar growing up. Given their current situations in life, their paths to get there take shape through a series of interchangeable decisions and life events. One Wes through mentorship in decision-making ends up a Rhodes Scholar and decorated war veteran, while the other Wes minus the mentoring ends up in prison serving a life sentence. The age-old cry, “It takes a village,” resonates in Moore’s examination of his mirrored upbringing. …show more content…

Wes’s mother Joy had issues coping with her husband’s death, and shortly thereafter Wes and his family moved to the Bronx to live with his grandparents. There, young Wes finds his living situation to be stricter than what he previously encountered with his parents and found himself trying to escape. Author Wes was beginning to grow into his own in the Bronx and Wes’s Draper 2 mother decided that her son would attend a private school in Manhattan outside of the inner city. The author conflicted with his identity stated, “Even if you weren’t running with the coolest clique, you still got some percentage of your rep from your school, and the name Riverdale wasn’t going to impress anyone . . . .It made my crew kind of suspicious of me” (Moore, 49). The author Wes was slipping in school and in life, and his mother began threatening him with military school. The final straw for Wes came when the police detained him for vandalism. His mother made the necessary decision to enroll him in military school. The other Wes Moore was born in Baltimore and like the author to a single working class mother. Mary his mother was attending John Hopkins University trying to leave Baltimore …show more content…

With his mother working long hours to provide, Wes was typically unsupervised leaving him in the hands of his brother Tony who was “fiercely protective” (Moore, 26). Tony had his own issues with life; he was a well-known neighborhood gangster and drug dealer. Despite his brother’s issues Wes attempted to follow his own path. Football became Wes’s outlet, unfortunately he became so consumed in football his grades fell and his troubles began. Wes slipped through the cracks of public education and found himself with a juvenile record and the urge for acceptance. Wes making a critical decision in his life, without a voice around to say otherwise entered the drug game. Both Wes Moore’s shared a common thread while growing up. They both grew up in single parent environments, both were raised in inner city neighborhoods, and both had run-ins with the law. As author Wes Moore states in the introduction, “The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine . . . . The tragedy is that my story could have been his” (xi). He had Draper 3 discovered what he shared with his inmate counterpart was much greater than he and his subject. The story of the two Wes Moore’s was shared similarly by a generation of men “who came

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