2017 was a hard year. But in a thousand ways, big and small, you showed up. You loved, you learned, you resisted — and you cleared the way for a better year in 2018.

We've got to remember that the future is ours to build. And this year, local action in California will have a huge impact. While the Trump administration spreads hate, we can spread hope. It's up to all of us to reimagine a country that includes all people in the promises of the Constitution.

❯❯ Join us for our webinars on critical civil liberties issues facing our state and the nation.

• Voting Rights
  Tuesday, Jan. 16, 6-7:30 p.m.
  California has one of the lowest rates of voter registration and voter turn-out in the country. 2018 is a critical year for ballot measures, local elections like the DA races, and of course, changing who holds the keys to power. In this webinar, we'll give you the resources you need to get all eligible California voters to the polls, starting now!
• Reproductive Justice & Sex Education
  Tuesday, Jan. 23, 6-7 p.m.
  We're in a critical moment. Sexual harassment and abuse is being both challenged and normalized. Discrimination against LGBTQ people is on the rise. Here in California, we have the power to make a change. Our schools are required to teach sex ed that addresses healthy relationships and consent and that challenges stereotypes about gender and sexual orientation. But many school districts need extra encouragement to provide the required instruction. They need to hear from you. In this webinar, you will learn how to be a parent advocate for sex education in your district.
• Criminal Justice Reform
  Tuesday, Feb. 6, 6-7 p.m.
  Right now, a powerful coalition of conservative law enforcement is targeting California mayors and city councils with a cynical misinformation campaign. Their goal is to increase support for mass incarceration and roll back the clock on criminal justice reform. We need you to counter their lies with the truth. In this webinar, we'll set you up with the skills you need to advocate for local initiatives that truly promote public safety and healthy communities.

❯❯ Register to receive the webinar log-in information.

In 2018, let's resolve to reimagine what's possible. The future is ours to build!

Philip Alston, the​ United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, travels the world to investigate horrific living conditions. On a recent fact-finding trip, he found people barely surviving in vermin-infested homeless encampments, a devastating scarcity of affordable housing and municipalities that make it a crime to be homelessness, as if that could be a cure. He even spotlighted the fact that dental care was so scarce for the poor that he saw people who had lost all their teeth.

But Alston was not reporting on a so-called third-world country. His blistering report was the result of his visits to several parts of the United States, including Southern California.

“Instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights,” Alston said in a statement last month. “As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.”

Alston’s full report will not be issued until the spring, but his 14-page statement presented after his U.S. fact-finding tour painted a portrait of a nation in the grip of a moral failure that threatens to undermine its democracy.

He put the blame squarely on public officials who engage in a “dual narrative” about American society in which “the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success. The poor are wasters, losers and scammers.”

It’s a narrative that has justified deep cuts in aid programs, pushing more and more people into extreme poverty and homelessness, while funneling billions to those atop the economic ladder. The attitude spreads like a contagion in the hearts and minds of ordinary people who, having absorbed this hateful message, respond to poverty and homelessness with a hardened heart rather than empathy and moral outrage.

Alston was especially disheartened by conditions on Skid Row in Los Angeles only blocks away from million-dollar condos. “Homelessness on this scale is far from inevitable and again reflects political choices to see law enforcement rather than low cost housing, medical treatment, psychological counseling and job training as the solutions,” he said. “But the futility of many existing approaches was all too evident as I walked around some of the worst affected areas.”

While in L.A., he also heard from several civil society organizations in a forum organized by the ACLU of Southern California. Some representatives of these groups spoke of municipalities in wealthy Orange County enclaves where the innocent act of sleeping or resting in public has been criminalized, even when people literally have nowhere else to go.

As the result of these “crimes,” municipalities extract money in the form of fines, fees and bail, forcing people to subsidize the apparatus that oppresses them. That is, if they can pay — many are simply thrown into an endless cycle of debt and jail time.

Our political leaders on both sides of the aisle have, for the most part, either avoided the topic of poverty or engaged in cynical hate speech that dehumanizes and blames poor people for the deprivation they experience. Alton’s statement makes an impassioned argument that ending poverty and protecting the basic human rights of people in the U.S. will require a moral reckoning.

“Rather than responding to homeless persons as affronts to the senses and to their neighborhoods,” he said, “citizens and local authorities should see in their presence a tragic indictment of community and government policies.”

How we respond to these issues going forward will tell us much about the nation. And now, with even the U.N. involved, the whole world is watching.