The other wes moore
Education and Success, Drugs and Money Everyone lives their life differently. It’s obvious, yet so obscure. People look at others and wonder why they function the way that they do. The truth is, we will never know. Everyone’s story is different. Everyone has a different upbringing, and different values. In The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore, this concept is brought to light, showing how different two lives can become when they go separate ways; one towards education and its rewards, the other towards money and its corrupted power. One of the stories written in this book belongs to the author Wes Moore himself. While he had a rough start to life, with his dad dying unexpectedly when he was only three years old, he came out with a very successful life for himself. In his family, education was a vital part of life, and his mom would give them the best possible education that she could. Moore states:
“My mother decided soon after our move to the Bronx that I was not going to public school. She wasn’t a snob, she was scared… But no matter how much the world around us seemed ready to crumble, my mother was determined to see us through it. When we moved to New York, she worked multiple jobs…whatever she could do to help cover her growing expenses” (47).
Moore’s mother, a college graduate herself, would not let her children fail to receive a proper education. She sent them to Riverdale, an expensive, private school, so that they wouldn’t fall victim to the public school system of the Bronx. Failure was never an option in Wes’s household, and even though he had tried to rebel against this fact many times as a young child, this is ultimately what helped him to succeed in the rest of his life. There had been multiple times in his life that Wes could have fallen victim to the streets, and become just another juvenile criminal like so many around him, but he didn’t, because of the constant fight that his mother put up to make sure that he succeeded
“My mother decided soon after our move to the Bronx that I was not going to public school. She wasn’t a snob, she was scared… But no matter how much the world around us seemed ready to crumble, my mother was determined to see us through it. When we moved to New York, she worked multiple jobs…whatever she could do to help cover her growing expenses” (47).
Moore’s mother, a college graduate herself, would not let her children fail to receive a proper education. She sent them to Riverdale, an expensive, private school, so that they wouldn’t fall victim to the public school system of the Bronx. Failure was never an option in Wes’s household, and even though he had tried to rebel against this fact many times as a young child, this is ultimately what helped him to succeed in the rest of his life. There had been multiple times in his life that Wes could have fallen victim to the streets, and become just another juvenile criminal like so many around him, but he didn’t, because of the constant fight that his mother put up to make sure that he succeeded
Cited: Moore, Wes. The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010.