Hospital Observation

There is a massive modern hospital just across the street from where I live in Dayton, Ohio. I had occasion last week to be in there for fairly serious surgery, and what struck me most about the experience was the contrast between the high-quality, experienced, older caregivers – mostly women – and the younger, arrogant, insolent, staff who lacked even the remotest sense of compassion or humanity.

I've reflected often since then as to why the contrast was so striking to me, and the issue that seems most important to me is whether one sees the human being as a collection of particles, atoms, molecules, electro-chemical entities or whether one sees the human being's essence as a love, a soul, or spiritual entity.

I hold the latter view, and the way I sometimes express it is that we are spirits having a physical experience in this world, rather than physical objects without soul or spirit. I think immediately as I write this of Wordsworth's “Ode: On The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” particularly of it's ending lines which go:

   Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

William Wordsworth

   Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
   To me the meanest flower that blows can give
   Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.



That is actually a hard-earned position, given the nearly universal view around here that electro-chemical particles are all there is, that money is the measure of value, that technological wizardry represents progress, that humans are essentially computers, and forty years of Ayn Randian selfishness, greed and exploitation have been good.

The worst offenders seemed to me to be the arrogant, contemptuous, male, rich weasels. And it seemed nothing short of miraculous that the mature, decent, capable and kind women were even able to survive in such an environment.