Tonight, activists from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign and the Philadelphia-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union will be hosting a panel on “The Foreclosure Crisis and Economic Human Rights.” The panel is sponsored by Penn Haven and will take place at 8:30 p.m. in the Ben Franklin Room of Houston Hall.
There is no need to be reminded that America is in crisis. We have all felt symptoms of the illness that plagues our country. We are aware of the things that we once had the luxury to ignore: the threat of tuition hikes, the diminished wealth of our parents, the coercive trap of ever-growing student loans, the limitations of our insurance coverage and the fragility of our own self-determination.
For some, these realities are especially stark: the cruelty of eviction and the harsh experience of a night spent on the winter streets or in the backseat of a car. For all, these realities are a wake-up call. They ripped through the thin veneer of comfort behind which so many Americans lived before the housing bubble broke last year.
In the United States, this has meant that 1.4 million people had their homes foreclosed on in 2008; 1.8 million anticipate a similar fate in 2009. Though numbers in themselves cannot fully capture the depth of human suffering, they can serve to startle, anger and awaken us to the circumstances of our neighbors.
Let us open our eyes and examine the system that surrounds us. Hard work, honesty and education are no guarantee for a life of security and prosperity. We must ask ourselves: Is anyone totally secure from the isolating pain of poverty in a political and economic system that is almost entirely in the hands of an elite and imperfect few?
To answer this question is to reveal the need for change. Yet we are aware that our leaders are unwilling or unable to stomp out the corrosive influence of those vested interests that sustain our broken system.
The bureaucrats, the dominant political parties, the corporations, hired experts, lobbyists and the establishment media cannot or will not fix it because they are invested in it. Only by wielding power that comes from outside of America’s centralized hierarchy can we hope to create equitable communities for ourselves. And so we must organize.
We are Penn students, Penn faculty, Penn staff. We are organizers with Penn Haven. In partnership with the national Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC), we are calling for:
•An immediate moratorium on evictions nationwide in order to evaluate and reform the culture of debt, misinformation and irresponsibility
•A commitment on the part of students to better understand the structural causes of poverty and the framework that consistently reproduces these conditions
•A drive to organize students, faculty and staff in solidarity with the poor in order to bolster the emerging movement to end poverty in this country
Please join us today at 8:30 p.m. in the Ben Franklin Room on the second floor of Houston Hall for the panel discussion. We will be preparing ourselves for Thursday, Dec. 3 at 10 a.m., when students will gather at the Civic House to march to the Federal Building in Center City and join a large rally to call for an immediate moratorium on evictions resulting from foreclosures in this country. Even in this time of crisis, we as a community — through organization— have power. Let’s learn how to use it.
Pavi Jaisankar and Russell Trimmer are a College junior and a College sophomore, respectively, and members of Penn Haven.
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