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I had to leave the book club meeting because on the day we were discussing this book was when my daughter delivered her first baby, my first grand daughter. I had to rush out of Marlene’s house to go to get Sara West, the doula. Hurriedly, I motored to Kaiser Medical in Santa Clara, CA. I missed the discussion on Wes Moore.
Wes Moore is inspiring, a man of great achievement, who spoke of failure and the ability to rise above it. Failure to do things correctly in the beginning made him strong, determined and able to overcome the unsurmountable difficulties of growing up in the inner cities of Maryland, where drugs and chaos were the order of the lives of African American children living there. Surprisingly, Wes More had a namesake, another Wes Moore who came from the same ghetto and drug infested neighborhood that he came from and he started a connection by visiting him and writing him from the
Jessup Correctional Facility where the other Wes was incarcerated. Two lives almost parallel to a certain point suddenly became divergent. One became a businessman and army reservist, Rhodes scholar and philantrophist, and the other, serving a lifetime of imprisonment. What made the difference? What was the turning point in the lives of the two Wes’ that made them who they were?
This book is very rich in vivid descriptions on what the lives of inner city children are like, drug dealing and drug use are the order of the day, gangs and violence are the horrors of mothers, life is so inimical that there is no other recourse but to leave. But to where? Life’s vicissitudes follow the poor, the marginalized and the downtrodden. But there are the few who escape and who rise above the rest, due to fate, by the hand of chance being kindly or just randomly there. Wes Moore’s mother was a disciplinarian, had the vision to take her son away from the school that housed the drug pushers and the malevolent kids of the neighborhood. He went across town where the affluent students went, and he described himself to be too poor to belong there and too “classy” to belong to his old neighborhood. His mother threatened to send him to military school if he misbehaved in his new school, and to military school he was sent after becoming a troublemaker at his new surroundings. He escaped and was made fun of at military school, but there were enough people there who bcame his role model, people who cared enough for him to straighten and turn his life around.
The book also talked about UBUNTU, a philosphy of life practiced by the tribes in South Aftrica, the philosophy that we are all interconnected. This primes the natives of that tribe in Africa to welcome all guests with open arms, to be non violent, and to realize that we are all a part of each other and that whatever affects one, affects all. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu preached ubuntu to their fellow Africans.
