I was in a community where we were out demonstrating. We were holding vigils against the Vietnam War, in - like, starting in around '67, I think, before it really exploded as a big movement.
[My mother] was busy being a homemaker and was not an activist by any means.
We had all the advantages of being in, you know, the '50s and the '60s, where a one-income household could actually support a family. And mom was around and wanted nothing more than to just, you know, do everything she could for her kids.
There was really interesting work going on, for example, in the Mississippi bayou, where there were some really exemplary health centers that also became centers with kind of political organizing.
Jack Geiger, for example, was a leader of that movement. He was part of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was kind of one of the ways that I worked my way into social activism in medicine.
As I came through medical school, it was very exciting because physicians were reaching out to each other, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and sort of helping to build bridges among, you know, people, people who were not allowing our government to pit us against each other and to actually take us to the brink of nuclear war. And Physicians for Social Responsibility wound up getting a Peace Prize, a Nobel Peace Prize, which they shared with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
We have a First Amendment for good reasons. We need a free press because without an educated electorate we cannot have a functioning democracy.
We need to use antitrust laws. You know, we need to create real media again.
My struggles have been around protecting our air quality, protecting people from mercury in fish. I was very involved in the effort to get the FDA to recognize that mercury in fish is a real health issue and the FDA, you know, needed to be on that. But they were very tight with the fishing industry and did not want the public to be aware in the same way that they later didn't want the public to be aware of the problems with Vioxx, and they sat on the studies for many years and allowed 140,000 people to develop heart disease.
I have had a long tug-of-war going on with the FDA, in particular, and with other regulatory agencies, and it has nothing to do with vaccines.
I don't think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they're already sick and we don't deal with what's making them sick to start with, that's a real problem.
I found that the walls that are created by the institutions of health care are very problematic, and I felt not good about giving people pills and procedures and then sending them back out to the things that were making them sick in the first place.
One of the patients that really stands out for me was a middle-aged woman who actually had HIV in the early days, and helping her kind of come to terms with that. She had rather late-stage illness, but just helping her, sort of cope with the challenges of the disease and the infections and all that, but also her social issues, like, coming out to her family about the illness, and a very religious family.
I was at Harvard Medical School and there were not a lot of, kind of, community health options, and I wound up at - sort of in Harvard Community Health Center for various reasons.
I came from a very comfortable, middle-class family living in Highland Park, Illinois.Really growing up in a Jewish community with a fabulous public school.
Without the jobs being available to enable them to repay that [student-loan] debt in the course of their financial lifetimes, basically.We maintain that, yes, that's a significant chunk of change - it's $1.3 trillion - but what investment is more worth making than in a generation that does not have a future?
They [Democrats and Republicans] agree with each other on either doing nothing or giving lip service to climate change and the really transformative changes that need to happen.
We also call for a freeze on the bank accounts of those countries, including our allies, with due warning.
We call for a weapons embargo.
And "all the above" [what President Barack Obama calls his policy of promoting all forms of domestic energy], compared to "drill, baby, drill," if you actually look at the track record, we've massively escalated the emissions of methane and carbon dioxide.
The scientists actually have suggested things that ambitious. There are good studies coming out of Stanford, Mark Jacobson for example and others, showing how it can be done. But it really requires a sense of emergency. It cannot be done unless we really understand that literally our lives are on the line.
We call for, actually, a weapons embargo to the Middle East, which we can lead since we are supplying the majority of weapons which, in fact, then find their way into all parties on all sides.
The most recent science including from Jim Hansen, the foremost climate scientist, suggests that we could see as much as, according to his study, meters' worth [of sea-level rise] - that is nine, 12, 15 and more - as soon as 50 years from his study.
We're looking at catastrophic impacts in our lifetime, not only that every month now we're setting a new World Almanac record.
We call for, on the other hand - how do you deal with ISIS [Islamic State], of course, is the question that comes up immediately, ISIS and other terrorist groups.
