PTH Member Responds to the Closing of Peter's Place

I am writing in response to your front page article, "Outrage over plan to close Chelsea homeless shelter," (Volume 3, Number 24, June 4-17, 2009).

The outrage expressed by some seniors at the closing of city shelters and drop-in centers is completely understandable although, I believe, misplaced.  If Peter's Place has been the only drop in center here specifically for seniors, its callousness in shutting down without providing alternate living quarters for its residents, frail as many are, is only a reflection of an endemic callousness there all along.  Seniors should regard their ousting not as a tragedy but as an exodus. 

Release from bondage is generally painful; there is often a temptation to cling to one's chains.  Or how could any Israelite under Moses long for Egypt?  How could any Southern slave fight against emancipation?  Yet the Hebrew Bible testifies to the one phenomenon, Frederick Douglass to the other.

When faced with my horror over the single hard chair given each of us to sleep on at Peter's Place, and over the prohibition against our elevating our legs, one resident or other was always quick to assure me that eventually one gets used to all that.  How many times I heard such a line!  One gets used to sleeping on a single hard chair!  One gets used to sleeping pressed up against many others!  One gets used to irrational prohibitions!  Yet is that what we are here for, ladies and gentlemen, to get used to tyrannical abuse? 

If the closing down of Peter's Place represents only one small portion of a city-wide excising of programs for the elderly, is it not time for a senior revolt?  Down with second class citizenship!  Down with substandard medical treatment!  Down with predatory nursing homes!  Down with the use of human bodies as pharmaceutical laboratories!  Down with all shelters and drop in centers! 

Seniors deserve private housing, not public corralling.  We deserve each a clean, private bed, not a barn full of bug ridden hard chairs.  We deserve first rate nutrition with a vegetarian alternative, not canned vegetables and stale or contaminated meat.    We deserve quiet when we wish it, not the endless blasting of a television or radio.  We deserve to be treated with dignity, not infantilized or otherwise demeaned. We do not deserve to be screamed at, scapegoated, threatened, or assaulted.    We deserve autonomy and freedom of expression, not silencing or other prison-like constraints.

I do not know if I am at all responsible for the closing of Peter's Place.  There had been talk of its closing long before I arrived there and all through my tenure of several months.  Yet if I did have anything to do with it, I can only rejoice.  The following is a letter I wrote shortly before being thrown out, and after speaking with, and listening to, a large number of residents who knew about or read it and were supportive of it.  It shows systemic neglect on the part of those in charge, and widespread dissatisfaction among residents. Copies of it and the other enclosed material were sent to the mayor, the governor, and then senator Barack Obama. 

Sincerely,


Joan Harrison
Civil Rights Committee,
Picture the Homeless