EDWARD GREEN 
COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR / NEW YORK CITY  
What Does a Person Deserve?
BY EDWARD GREEN
Part 2
Ill Will and Good Will in a Hospital

This story shows powerfully: medical care must be separated from the desire for profit! Marwu's life is saved at the hospital, and the baby is born healthy. Yet the visit is surrounded by financial brutality. As they arrive, the supervisor detains Kollie and Marwu at the door, saying: "Don't you know that you must throw something in my hand before going inside?" And a doctor insists that Kollie sign a "death certificate" before he will treat Marwu. By signing it, the doctor informs Kollie:

you and your family are waiving all your rights to hold any doctor, nurse, midwife, or hospital administrator responsible for anything if your wife should die--or even develop any complication before, during, and after surgery. Having no choice, Kollie signs. The doctor has taken advantage of Kollie's fear for his wife's health to protect himself and his colleagues. No matter what hurt the hospital might inflict, there will be no possibility of legal remedy. 

The doctor then coldly tells him, surgery will be withheld until the bills are paid, and "possibly in advance." Marwu's life is being held hostage to the profit system. And near the end of this story there are these chilling sentences:

Kollie felt somewhat disappointed that he didn't get a boy child. But he felt that something might have gone wrong in the Baby Pool. He had heard rumors that... sometimes rich men gave large amounts of money to nurses and midwives to give them the boy children if their wives had given birth to girls...Kollie tried to believe Miss Washington, who was the first person to tell him that Marwu had delivered a girl child. But he wondered if the senior midwife wasn't part of trading babies in the hospital. What Literature Has Gone For

"Literature has constantly gone for giving a self to people who weren't usually seen as having one," Eli Siegel said in his lecture "What Has the Past Gone For?," a report of which is now included in the Definition Press book Goodbye Profit System: Update (1982). "The whole history of literature is about man's wanting to be seen fairly by others and to see others with the fullness of meaning they may have."

These words are beautiful, and so important. Poor people in a poor country, Kollie and Marwu are given richness of meaning by Similih Cordor, who wanted to see them truly. 

Aesthetic Realism explains, and art is the great evidence for it: whenever we are fair to what is not ourselves, we benefit! Cordor, hoping to give this struggling, and oh-so-representative couple the kind understanding they deserve, has also taken care of himself: he has expressed himself, and earned the respect of his readers. And we, the readers, are enriched, too; our selves are kinder, deeper, more perceptive. 

The logic of art, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, needs to be carried over to every aspect of life, including politics and economics. The world will not be honest or civilized until people everywhere feel: "I am being good to myself by making sure others get what they deserve! And at a minimum that surely includes: adequate food; a home to live in with dignity and ease; education that brings joy and clarity to people's minds; and health care whenever a person needs it.

 
 To Continue: Part 3
 
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