The Other Wes Moore

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Ciara Fennelly QU 101 Professor Balkaran 8/19/13 The moving novel, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of two individuals; both named Wes Moore, who both grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Both boys had parallel circumstances including growing up fatherless, hanging out on the streets and making mistakes that ran them into trouble with the law. One Wes Moore ended up as an extremely respectable man with many accomplishments, including becoming a Rhodes Scholar, an accomplished Veteran, White House Fellow and a businessman. On the contrary, the other Wes Moore was not very fortunate and ended up in prison serving a life sentence. These boys shared the same name but many factors such as learning from disrespect and gaining the respect from their families, peers, neighbors, and community shaped two extremely different lifestyles. Respect is a powerful thing. Respect means a lot of different things for different people. It includes taking someone’s feelings, needs, thoughts, ideas, wishes and preferences into consideration. It also means taking all of these seriously and giving them worth and value. How does one earn respect initially? Respect is earned by being good at what you do, respecting others, honoring what you say, respecting yourself, not bad mouthing others, becoming a role model and standing up for what you believe in. No matter how long it takes to earn respect, it can be lost easily by dishonesty, too much pride, laziness, lack of compassion, gossip, two-faced, entitlement or acting like a know-it-all. Although in some circumstances it is possible to make terrible mistakes with one’s life and still regain the respect of people who matter. But in order to regain the respect where it has been lost will take great measures. The individual who has lost the respect must go above and beyond what they initially had done to gain that respect. As a young

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