Rosa Parks modeled a change in the power of individuals and a defiance that was so astounding that her very quiet nature screamed for justice and dignity louder than any terrrorist activity that we may be confronting today. She remains the standard for living her values, for extending her dream to all around her, and for calling us all to task for doing our part in the plight for human rights. She was not a Mother Theresa, as there was no Church to shield her person and actions from controversy. Neither did she not limit her values to only those who were sick. She was neither a Joan of Arc, as she claimed no powers other than those of her personhood. With all that has happened since she seated herself in Montgomery, nothing reveals our current standards of racial and economic descrximation as much as our current healthcare system.

At the time of her famous busride, there were no HMO;s, Polio vaccination was extended to everyone, and doctors still made house calls. Her seating on the bus is not being modeled in emergency rooms across the country, but hardly considered a change. Rather, our communities accept that the poor go in through the emergency room rather than through the doors of consistent health advocacy. We treat the sick, but fail to keep them well.

I grew up in Detroit. I lived in well-sprinkled neighborhoods..Jews, Blacks, and others. In Detroit, the Jewish community hovered together as the time of the growth of Detroit was during Wortld War II when so many immigrants moved to MIchigan. The community did not welcome everyone…Detroit had boundaries for Blacks, defactor ghettos for Jews, communities that welcomed Whites only…meaning Christian Whites. Nonetheless, my upbringing was in the middle of civil rights activism with my Mother, Beatrice Mazer, being at the forefront of advocating for equality in all of her personal and professional affairs.

The revelations of recent natural disasters was not so much that Nature controls our destinies. Rather, hurricane Katrina revealed a third world living among us, thriving because of our neglect, and functional in sustaining the confict between was America stands for and how we live. The poor always die first.

As I watched the funeral of Rosa Parks, I longed for the days of empowered commitment to change and human rights that seems to have been exchanged for econmic expediency. I miss the richness of Detroit and claim it as my own, even as I live in the West for the past many decades. What Rosa Parks left to each of us was the stark reality that to do nothing is to comply with those who would put upon all of us a standard of inequality in our personhood. To do something is extraordinary. To tolerate the intolerable is to accommodate poverty and sacrifice human potential, and to place anything in the middle of the road of descrimination and genocide, is to cause stunning changes that resonate beyond ones own lifetime.

THe real test of our values as a community is in how we extend the rights to medical excellence and the best care to those who need it, not only o those who can pay for it. it is in the ways in which we refuse to tolerate theisolation of the poor or exploit their needs to demonstrate the burden of caring for them. Rather, good health is a human right, to be bartered in the name of economic expediency, efficiency, or justified rationing of human caring.