Get thee to a Cineplex!

Tired of all that apocalyptic posing telling us that we're headed off the (fiscal) cliff or that the (debt) ceiling will fall and crush us? Exhausted by the unending permutations of peril? Debilitated by chronic anxiety in the news, on TV, on the web, or Twitter?

Well, the place to look is at the screen.

Lincoln

Spielberg's paean to our 16th President offers us a tutorial on the moral grip and political savvy to solve problems, big problems - doing away with a social wrong that had strangled the country from its founding. If you saw the movie Amazing Grace a few years ago about William Wilberforce's successful campaign to end the British slave trade, this is the moral book end on our side of the Atlantic.

Lincoln had an easy path to assuage the parties of his day. Negotiate an end to the war, leave slavery in place but modified, and bask in the role of mediator/ negotiator/ healer. Only the abolitionists would have vigorously protested, but most of them spent the war eviscerating Lincoln anyway - they thought him prepared to leave slavery standing.

But Lincoln chose the hard road. No compromise with slavery. Alienating the parties, prolonging the war, and subjecting himself to taunts of being war monger/ radical/ peacebreaker. While the cooperating abolitionists expected and affirmed his direction, many others were surprised and suspicious.

That 16th President gave us the 13th Amendment and 147 years later we admire his resolute stand as moral, spiritual, and political leader, drawing from each in the cause of abolition.

From Lincoln we learn that overcoming a moral wrong that impacts millions is no easy task. Some doubted that the "peculiar institution" of slavery was a moral issue or wrong.

Some thought the relentless advocacy to "abolish," rather than maintain with modification, far too radical. Was it really possible to abolish what had been reified in the Constitution, practiced for 6,000 years in history - 200 in our own country? An issue that seemed settled to most.

Many questioned how the institutions that had been constructed around slavery and aligned with its continuance could ever be disassembled. Wouldn't that cause hardship, they asked.

Lincoln and the abolitionists focused on the true hardships - the human tragedy, the inhuman conditions, and moral presumption that someone could be owned.

Our focus on the long misery of homelessness is subject to these lessons. Nothing was simple then, nor now. Back then the political will was mustered by both moral enlightenment and Machiavellian manipulations. The established order was disassembled with great travail. These were the attributes of abolishing a moral wrong - flexing one's morality and dismantling the status quo.

Les Misérables

Lincoln is not the only film that has a message for us in this season. The film version of Les Misérables is in theaters now. And while I would rather read the HUD Continuum of Care regulations than go to a musical (!!), Victor Hugo's message cannot be undone by Russell Crowe's crooning!

Jean Valjean has spent 17 years in prison for stealing bread to feed his starving nieces and sister-in-law. The penal system treated him harshly. No pretense to rehabilitation, a caring soul devolves to a manic and cynical human shell in its cells.

On release, after he had "paid his debt to society," he discovers that there is an ongoing "interest" payment he must make. He carries a yellow card, detailing his status, which he must present to anyone he engages for lodging, for food, for work. Discrimination formalized in that presentation. He is summarily rejected at every doorway, every inn, every job. Sounds eerily familiar in our "enlightened" world 200 years later.

You know the rest of the story (Spoiler Alert!). He becomes, through the redemptive interventions of a priest living the Gospel, a successful businessperson and, eventually, an elected official, a Mayor. Jean Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeleine.

He is hounded throughout by the corrections system, but ultimately, love overcomes even that impediment as he repeatedly gives his life for others.

Even with the priestly intervention of resources, only when Valjean has employment does he engage a trajectory that offers stability and philanthropy.

In Hugo's story, we are reminded of the difficulty of re-engaging life for those who have served time and "paid their debt." Without that serendipitous good fortune of love, Valjean's bitterness would have lead back to the prison galleys.

Without having a friend who served more than two decades and is now released with a bracelet and intrusive parole officer, I would not understand the power of Hugo's story or the lingering reality of its themes two centuries later. To re-engage in life, my friend has more than a dozen people supporting his well-being, and still it is hard and day by day.

The antidote is present, thankfully. We have a better idea of what to do because of initiatives like Ready, Willing & Able and Delancey Street. Rather than relying on a lucky break or serendipitous encounter, RWA and efforts like it make the solitary miracle an everyday occurrence. Extending welcome and, yes, love to those who have "paid their debt," RWA in its rigor, encompassing security and a focus on "upward mobility" eases the "interest" payment of discrimination and rejection.

The means is supportive work, residential stability, and belief in each individual.

Took us a long time to put in place Hugo's essentials - love, work, responsibility, self-esteem. But they are now at work on the East Coast, Bay Area, and soon in one of the poorest communities in our country. Wherever, it's a formula that works - overcoming feelings of discrimination on the outside and feelings of lack of worth and cynicism on the inside.

Lincoln and Les Misérables. Movies that light the way to freedom, forgiveness, and faith. Inspiration on the silver screen. Get thee to the cinema!

Philip Mangano