Cory McCray is a Walking, Talking Miracle

Friends, here is this week’s episode.

I’m going to tell you a secret. I didn’t like Cory McCray all that much the first few times I met him. This was years ago. I’m pretty sure he was an electrician at the time, but one who had a lot of opinions and a political consciousness. I had a newspaper opinion column at the time. He complained to me that he had submitted opinion articles to similar publications, but they hadn’t gotten picked up. I thought to myself, “I’m a journalist. To those papers, you’re just some random dude. Why would they give you special consideration?”

But I was wrong. Cory was special. I think Cory and I had that conversation in roughly 2011. Four years later, he became a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. In 2019, he became a state senator. And this year, he took over as a subcommittee chair within the senate’s Budget and Taxation Committee, which oversees $60 billion of spending.

In my interview with Cory, a pattern became clear. He sees someone doing something that he wants to achieve, decides that should be achievable for him as well, watches and asks questions, and makes it happen. He saw what I was doing at the time and decided, I imagine, he could be just as good at it. I thought he was cocky and presumptuous. And he just kept on working. Cory was right.

The levels he’s reached since our 2011 conversation are remarkable. But the things he overcame before that point were actually the steepest part of his climb. The same state Cory represents today detained him when he was a juvenile. He did so much time before he turned 18 that he told his mom to give up on him. She said no, helped him find the apprenticeship that gave his life structure, and upwards he went.

So he calls his new book “The Apprenticeship that Saved My Life.” Talking to Cory made me more than a little verklempt. His story just naturally drew out of me pieces of my story that I’m still grappling with. I’m so glad to know him. We’re all lucky that he’s devoted his life to public service and making the path to happiness and success much less steep than the one he traveled.

“The Apprenticeship that Saved My Life” is in Conversation with “The Other Wes Moore”

In his memoir, “The Other Wes Moore,” current Maryland governor Wes Moore demonstrates how easily he might have switched places with another young man from Baltimore with the same name doing time for armed robbery if not for his mom and grandparents, key public policy programs, and institutions like the military that gave him the structure he needed. I went to college with Wes and got to see an earlier stage in his life when so much of what he’s doing now started to come into focus. I call Cory a miracle, because he is. I don’t think most people could do what he’s done. But it is urgently important that we recognize he did not do it alone and that he repeatedly says as much. Cory and Wes talk about individual agency, community, and public policy. Those are three legs of a stool. Too often, the US insists people lean solely on the first of those three supports and punishes them brutally when they fall.

The Policy Leg of the Stool

In our interview, Cory explained how he came to understand that a significant amount of the gun violence and fatal shootings in some parts of his district were tied to the long opening hours (up to 20 hours a day) of liquor stores. He introduced legislation to change that and has seen promising results.

Thanks for listening.