The Wire provides new prospective

Growing up I was the sheltered little white girl who was scared to drive in downtown Columbus after dark. So, I don’t claim to be street smart or to understand what it’s like to grow up in a poor, urban community.
However, I can claim a better understanding of urban issues since watching the HBO series The Wire. The gritty drama about the streets of inner city Baltimore is thought-provoking and scarily accurate.
The show tells the story of crime, drugs and corruption from the points of view of the drug dealers, the drugies, the cops, politicians and journalists. Most shows gloss over the facts or overly dramatize events to create hype, but The Wire shows life as it really is in the inner city.
A recent New Yorker articles heralds the series as the best television show ever produced, claiming it’s on the cutting edge. The show’s producers take excruciating pains to make sure the actors dialogue is 100 percent 2008 street talk. The show doesn’t gloss over death. People pay for their actions and sometimes people die who shouldn’t, but isn’t that life?
For me, The Wire has exposed this suburban, middle-class girl to what life is like for other people who haven’t been as blessed as I have. Perhaps, this is why the show is difficult for some people to watch. The show’s primary audience is other poor, urban individuals who relate to the characters or intellectuals who are fascinated by the show’s use of social stratification.
Yet for the rest of us who have never had to fear bullets flying through the windows of their home or having drug dealers solicit their children, we want to avoid the themes in the show.
The language is harsh. Sure, there is a lot of swearing, but the show is realistic. Would you expect a drug dealer not to use the F word or a tough cop not to throw out a couple swear words? You can’t change a person’s dialect. It’s like asking John Steinbeck to remove the swear words from The Grapes of Wrath. You don’t mess with a classic. The language is a part of the culture, just like the death, murder and drugs. It’s a part of society that most of us would prefer to overlook. It makes us uncomfortable and shocks us.
However, is it fair for us to turn our back on problems or to hope that someone else solves them? I look at The Wire as a form of social education. I have a new respect of individuals who have grown up in the inner city. I also have a better understanding of what poverty in America looks like.
So, my plea to everyone who reads this blog is to give The Wire a chance. Get past the language and look at the story and the struggle behind the words. It’s well worth the effort.