I recall a fellow in college sleeping on an abandoned mattress in the field next to his apartment when the intricacies of properly placing an entry key in a front-door lock were more than his pickled brain could handle late one night.
But the Cal State Fullerton students who plan to sleep in boxes tonight say they are doing so on purpose–and presumably without the aide of controlled and uncontrolled substances.
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“Box City,” as they are calling tonight's makeshift dormitory, is intended to raise awareness about the homeless population in Orange County, according to Zoha Bootwala, speaking to the Weekly on behalf of fellow Masters of Social Work students of 2015 at CSUF.
The event in front of the library aims to demonstrate how thousands of men, women and children sleep in Orange County every night and was coordinated with Orange-based nonprofit Family Promise, which assists homeless families. Family Promise Director Casey Crosby and Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) are scheduled to appear and offer words of encouragement starting at 6 tonight.
“Together, we can bring awareness to this issue and fight against injustice,” says Bootwala, whose college-age idealism is so adorable I'm heading to that empty field in San Dimas right now to see if the old mattress is still there.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.