I was speaking the other day to a friend who’s one of the City of Raleigh’s leaders. He was telling me about the book he’d been reading, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Though there are many insights in Gladwell’s book, my friend was particularly taken with the point Gladwell made that no one does it alone.

“It’s true,” he told me. “The people who think they made it themselves are fooling themselves. Everybody, everybody who’s ever ‘made it’ did so with someone else’s help.”

I completely agreed. All my youthful naivety about how America is supposed to work – how we’re a classless society and ‘all men are created equal’ – has always been sheer fantasy. I look at some of the kids in my side of town, growing up in some of the toughest situations imaginable. The deck is so overwhelmingly stacked against them that it’s a wonder anyone manages to escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
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