The Other Wes Moore Blog 1 - Quarter 4 Blog 2

Summary

The Other Wes Moore is a very inspring book that gets people thinking about choosing paths in life. It starts off with a Wes Moore talking about his childhood and how he had lost his father to a sudden stroke. Which then left his mother to raise him and left her in despair and deppression. Wes's father, Wes Sr., was a radio broadcaster and was popular in his neighborhood which was mourning for Wes Sr. as much as his wife and three kids were. Without a father to follow, Wes grew up in Baltimore but moved to Brooklyn with his grandmother and grandfather when his mother couldn't take living alone in Baltimore, as drugs and violence was washing the neighborhood out. In Brooklyn, Wes adaped to the Big Apple and made friends, but his neigborhood was reeling him in. His demeanor had changed; his grades were dropping and he was taking more pride into music, playing basketball with friends, and tagging.
But the OTHER Wes Moore was somewhat a different story. Wes Moore grew up in Baltimore as well as the other Wes Moore did (#1). He grew up fatherless, but that was only due to the fact that he was an alcholic and his mother, Mary, did not want him around. Wes grew up in the dark part of Baltimore just like Wes #1 did. He had an older sibling named Tony who was brought into the drug game at the age of 13. By 18, he was a veteran and was running "his own operation". Regardless of being a drug source for the Gun Hill Projects in Baltimore, he always told his little brother to stay out of the drug buisness. But Wes could do nothing but let himself go. One day, he saw a kid with a gold ring and well dressed for the 1980s, not to mention, a headset. Wes was attracted to it and asked the boy what he could do to have one of those. The boy had told Wes to stand on the corner and listen to the headset and let the other people on the corner know when the cops were around. As curious as he was, Wes agreed and was officially into the drug game even though he never touched drugs until he was about 12 years old.

Fascination

One thing that fascinated me about Wes (#2) getting into the drug buisness was why he got into it and it made me think that he proved a good point about the "slinging" and "hustling". Wes's first interaction with dugs was when he was going to have a cookout with friends and ditch school. Before this, he had moved into a better neighborhood which was more surrounded by white people but still found african american friends as nobody else wanted to be his friend. Anyway, as he was looking for some change in the usual place in his mothers room, it wasnt there so he started to snoop around. In his mothers closet, he found a bag of marijuana which had then cancelled the cookout and attracted his friends more to smoke than eat some good-ol hot dogs and burgers. Wes and his friends found a spot under a bridge and smoked the marijuana. At the end of the chapter, Wes had said, "As he lay in bed, he realized how yome seemed yp stop when he was high, how the drug-smoking it, feeling its effects, recovering  from it - made him forget everything else." Which led to, "he understood, faintly, how addictive that feeling could be, and how easy it would be to make some money off selling that feeling to people who needed it." Those two quotes caught my attention because who could blame him, it's a valid point. Yet, besides all the pros about making a little extra, the downsides such as getting shot or even arresting defeat that purpose of making easy money or everybody on EARTH would join that business. But the flaws to a good idea almost 65% of the time throw that idea to waste.