A Moral Call To Action On Poverty

Desmond, Gage, and Salgado onstage at CCA forum at Career.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - After spending years interviewing tenants and landlords and reporting on urban evictions, Matthew Desmond reached a conclusion that surprised him: Conventional liberal and conservative explanations that heap blame on everything from deindustrialization to out-of-wedlock childbirth overlook the actual root causes of poverty in this country.

Poverty comes not from an absence of resources, Desmond discovered, but from a national unwillingness to confront a profound moral problem. With empathy and effort and understanding, the communal choices that lead to unstable housing for this country’s neediest can be collectively rethought and made anew.

That rethinking about poverty and housing and that moral challenge took center stage Tuesday night in the auditorium of Hill Regional Career High School.

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Is It 2017? Or 1984?

Gorlick.

Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - On April 4, 1984, in the fictional state of Oceania, a low-level civil servant named Winston Smith begins to write a diary. In the repressive, dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984, where history is constantly erased and rewritten and individual expression is punishable by death, putting pen to paper to explore one’s innermost thoughts is truly a subversive act.

Thirty-three years later to the day, over 220 people filled a local independent arthouse movie theater to watch the 1980s film adaptation of Orwell’s mid-century novel to commemorate the beginning of Smith’s subtle rebellion against a totalitarian government.

As Smith struggled on screen to preserve some semblance of love, empathy, and hope in the face of a brutalizing political regime, the local audience was challenged to ask itself two critical questions: What are the parallels between this fictional 1984 and the real 2017? And how does one ensure that the actual United States government never slips into the suffocating, repressive dystopia of Oceania?

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