The Wire: 10 years gone, the lessons still fit
HBO
The Wire, Season 4
Season 4 of The Wire had the best opening scene to open a season. Season 4 also introduced those kids — poor, barely a sliver of a chance to make it and it breaks your heart kids.
They had been relegated to the background, but now the audience got to see the daily lives of all those forgotten kids. The opening quote for the Season 4 premiere was “Lambs to the slaughter…” and it fit the whole season concerning most every kid in Edward Tillman Middle School.
Anyone who has seen season 4 would get a flashback reading the poem “Because I Ain’t Got a Pencil” by a Baltimore youth. In season 4 The Wire began showing how all the pieces fit, where each action by a person goes to cause unintended consequences and how each gets there.
Sure, the drug game kept moving while Barksdale and Stanfield’s crews battled for corners. The political players fell into the same behaviors as those preceding them. But those kids, they don’t deserve being ignored. But then again, deserve has nothing to do with it.
In Season 1, the kids featured in the Pit were already in the game though at different levels. Wallace was a child on the fence, though Bodie was hardened beyond his years. Now the difference was even more pronounced. Though it is striking that after all those years as police, the first time Prezbo seems shocked is when one student cuts another. To the kids, it is just another day while it affects Prezbo through his whole weekend.
By using the educational system as a political tool, the kids receive less of an education in school than they do on the street. It is more important for the kids to learn the streets because the schools aren’t teaching them much except how to game another system. That may be all the knowledge they need, as Clay Davis perseveres through legal troubles.
Fact is, most of these kids would be better off learning from Bubbles and Cutty instead of what the Baltimore City School System was offering. Small and focused classes like Bunny Colvin ran always get applauded but never widely applied.
It was important for the new leaders to establish stability and order. City Hall and the city political apparatus comes to fall in line under the Carcetti administration. Prop Joe and Slim Charles fall in line under the menacing Marlo dictatorship. Teachers are hamstrung by the government mandated curriculum. And the kids, they suffer it all.