One Small Thing Can Make a Huge Difference

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In the memoir, The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore, two kids with the same name grow up in the same city of Baltimore, under similar conditions and in many ways, had similar lives, but their lives go in very different directions and end up in very different places. The influence of family and poverty seem to be the factor that sends each in the other direction. The author’s father dies when he was young, while the other Wes Moore’s father was just not around. The author’s mother sent him to military school, which significantly changed his life, while the other Wes Moore’s mother seemed to have no control of her son. A caring family, a loving environment and clear direction, as military school provides, and the ways different people deal with poverty, can easily be the factors that made Wes Moore the author pursue a positive lifestyle while his counterpart ended up in prison for life. The author moved to the Bronx with his family to live with his grandparents. He attended a private school there which he was failing. He started to act up missing school, doing petty crimes like graffiti, and started up with his sister. His mom decided that she had to send him to military school to get his act together, so with the help of his grandparents his mother was able to send him away. The other Wes Moore went into the drug business and as time went by he started rising in the ranks of his small group. Unlike the author’s mother, the other Wes’s mother didn’t do much to help her son besides once throwing out his drugs that she found. If she had done more to prevent her son from going down the wrong path then maybe he wouldn’t have ended up in jail. The author went to military school which changed his life and perhaps saved him from being in the same situation as the other Wes. Although he attempted to run away a few times, he eventually learned to cope with the fact

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