Why Eduardo Galeano Doesn't Get It
Obama in Bedlam
By JOHN ROSS

The Emergency Room at San Francisco General Hospital is an American Bedlam. Now the only trauma center in a city that has suffered nearly 100 violent homicides in the first 10 months of 2008, ER is a snake pit boiling over nightly with gunshot and stabbing victims, those mangled in street confrontations or otherwise mowed down in traffic, damaged gangbangers, raving lunatics, drunks in the throes of the DTs, handcuffed prisoners in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits, snarling cops, and harried if heroically serene medical personal just trying to survive their shifts.

Broken men and women moan and thrash on blood-drenched gurneys so jamming the narrow hallways that treatment is reduced to triage. Some patients are lashed to their impromptu beds, the more comatose hooked up to blinking machines. Bodily fluids are sprayed and spat so rudely that the caregivers are forced to wear plastic face visors.

I arrived in this little corner of Hell courtesy of 911 after I had stopped breathing, a borderline emergency, and was shelved for 25 hours in a war zone hallway while the mayhem surged and ebbed all around me. Twice during my stay, the hospital decreed a red alert and the ER was locked down by armed deputies, a measure a retired nurse tells me is imposed when rival gangs face off in the parking lot.

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