What's Going On?

It seems fitting that I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me on the same day that I finished The Wire. I have been slowly making my way through The Wire for about ten years now. I was early in the first season for years, until I decided last summer, probably spurred on by the beginning of what now seems like our modern civil rights movements.  Last summer I got through the middle of season 3, but then it just wasn't quite sustainable for me. However, this summer, especially after the tragedy surrounding Freddie Grey and Baltimore residents' powerful reaction to that, I was fully ready for the message of The Wire. What reminded me, though, was Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in Baltimore and his accounting of race politics in America was at once affirming and hard to take in, so I needed something to help me process it. The Wire was the perfect complement to the book because it took these challenges that I've been trying to wrap my mind around for the past few years - the need for community policing, the challenges of the war on drugs, the lack of accountability, etc - and puts them in the context of characters to whom I feel intimately connected. While I appreciated the many direct parallels between the book and the show, I'm disappointed that these problems are just as bad, if not worse, today as they were ten years ago when The Wire began.  I was walking somewhere this week when the song "What's Going On?" came through my headphones. Like Coates' book, I found it both heartbreaking and inspirational. How tragic that almost 45 years later the mothers are still crying and the brothers dying and we all feel powerless to stop it. However, my approach seems to be similar to Garvey's - I am also a firm believe in the fact that "only love can conquer hate." I even have a t-shirt that says it! Each of us who wants to stand on the side of love must do so dragging everyone that we can along with us. As Coates' agrees, individuals cannot do it alone - we need a sea change.