War in Iraq, Poverty in America

[marmar]

from Truthdig:


War in Iraq, Poverty in America


Posted on Aug 14, 2007
By Bill Boyarsky

They’re closing a hospital in my city, but I’m sure nobody in the rest of the country gives a damn.

If Robert F. Kennedy were alive and running for president, he’d tell America about the demise of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in South Los Angeles and what it means to America. He’d make Americans give a damn.

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, he’d be speaking at the hospital. After hearing his words, people across the country would realize Los Angeles’ loss was also their own. Dr. King would make them give a damn.

One of the most important, now forgotten, aspects of the tragic year of 1968 was the way Sen. Kennedy and Dr. King saw the relationship between the Vietnam War and poverty at home. If the war continued, poverty would too.

They carried this message throughout the country. It was not popular. Even some of those who loved him thought Dr. King should stick to his subject: civil rights. And too many opponents of the war thought Kennedy was muddying up the antiwar campaign by diving into the complexities of poor brown and black America. But the two persisted, and if Kennedy had been elected in 1968, more Americans would have been persuaded to care. Assassination—King in April and then Kennedy in June—silenced them.

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital is located around 120th Street and Wilmington Avenue in the heart of South Los Angeles, where the population, once almost all African American, now is also heavily Latino.

The hospital was built after the 1965 Watts riot. Watts is a relatively small community near the hospital, but its name became attached to a riot that raged widely through South Los Angeles. In those days, Los Angeles, which liked to consider itself enlightened, had many of the attributes of the Old South: a brutal, heavily white police department, a rotten public transportation system that did not serve poor areas, and segregated housing and public schools. There was no hospital for miles around. That’s what sparked and fed the riot. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070814_boyarsky_mlk_and_the_war_at_home/