For those of you who don’t know, I’m here tonight, and the other people are here tonight, because last October I gave a lecture at Mt. Lebanon High School.

I started the lecture in a very positive way, speaking about free medicine, our work in building a free hospital, and thirty years of service, and also clowning all over the world, and its service. I hinted in that time my concern politically. However in the very long dialogue portion of the talk, I gave statements that I know drew a lot of concern.

One of them was that I was predicting our extinction by mid-century if we don’t change from a world that worships money and power over to one that cares for compassion and generosity as a context for humanity.

The other — since it was right after 9-11 — I indicated that the United States had been the greatest terrorist organization since the second world war and I had nothing good to say about our current president. In fact I likened him to Hitler in Germany. I told the students I did not come with truth; I came with an extreme bias. I told them that I came from a lot of study. And I gave them a list of 50 books to read in order to give an introduction to how it is I came to conclusions, because I hated having to say it.

I came saying it as a physician. Tonight I’m going to speak as both a physician and a human, a caring human.

As a physician, as a family doctor, I know my patients wanted me to study all of the organ systems, to understand health care, and report to them when something could be good for them, or how to take care of something that was hurting them.

In my family practice, never charging money, having initial interviews with patients four hours long, having them come and stay in my home and going to their home, I had a different kind of relationship to my patients.

So in practice I started to see a connection between health care organ systems and social, political, economic and environmental systems, untaught in medical school, but I knew that violence was a medical problem, the discrepancy between rich and poor a medical problem, environmental pollution and all of its consequences, medical problems, because I saw them. And in studying those systems, as you would ask me to study the cardiovascular respiratory system and the endocrine system, etc., in looking at the health of our society, I studied the political, economic, environmental social systems.

And when I came to Mt. Lebanon High School, I didn’t give those students two books to read. I told them the fifty I gave them were an introduction to why I am coming there reporting extinction. I brought three of those books tonight.

"Dying for Growth," the saddest book I ever read, I read it while in Afghanistan last month. ‘Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor.’ Brutal. Every page making you weep for humanity. The consequences on human beings of transnational corporations, the IMF, the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, structural adjustment programs and export processing zones, the consequences of that globally and on our own country. When you find out that 11 million Americans go to bed hungry. You don’t want to read it if you don’t want to become an activist.

Last month I was in Afghanistan. I took 22 clowns from all six continents and ten tons of aid, and I was in a pediatric hospital, and I go in a hospital that has no food and no medicine, in a country where people live on 65 cents a day. Three starving children per cot. Each beside a mother who – if you’ve not seen the look of a mother next to a child dying of starvation, it’s. . .you don’t forget it.

And it is greed, the love of power over, that makes it happen. The book talks about health care in America, it talks about it all over the world. What we are doing, what we — and by that I mean the puppets in our government, and the puppets of governments all over the world, that kiss butt to transnational corporations — what they are doing to humanity.

Another book on the list is called "Pandora’s Poison." Six hundred pages about the organochlorine industry. Raise your hand if you know something about the organochlorine industry.

Pandora’s poison, it’s 40 million tons a year of the most toxic chemicals known to humans. In fact, there were no organochlorines really in the world before the middle part of last century, and now they’ve been around long enough to where scientists have gone all over the world and they haven’t been able to find a single plant or animal that doesn’t have residues.

If you’re wondering what are organochlorines, Dioxin, DDT, PVCs, they affect every organ system. I can’t go to a high school and not bring it up, you understand, I have to bring it up. It’s talking about extinction. Extinction is rich people, poor people. So the medical part of me is forced to tell you. It’s forced to tell every audience, that I am likening Bush and his cronies to Hitler. I’m here to tell you that the modern governments, the transnational corporations, are Hitler.

Hitler, though, actually had a smaller vision. The transnational corporations, the people in charge of our government, their visions are a lot bigger. They will lead us to extinction. And I invite you to study it enough to at least decide whether or not you’re going to do something about it, or not.

I’m sure all of you know I want you to work harder than you’re doing. However much of an activist you are I want you to double your hours. If there aren’t any more hours, I want you to fill your waking moments with that sense.

That’s the medical part of me, the invitation. The other part of me, the human part of me, wants to speak now. And that’s this book, "Inferno" by James Nachtwey, war photographer. If you haven’t really seen starvation and murder in its best form, this is your text.

The human part of me doesn’t understand a country where a ball bouncer makes more money than a school teacher, doesn’t understand why anyone watches TV, doesn’t understand throwing away cultures, throwing away people, tolerating a society where half the people – the women – have to walk frightened.

What do we have to do? Well ladies and gentlemen, I am here to speak up for humanity, and for the animals and plants, and to say, we will be extinct. Probably not the insects, some insects eat radiation. There are insects that live in volcanoes. There are insects that live several miles up. But the higher life forms are gone unless we have love stand up, unless compassion and generosity take the stand and refuse to allow wealth to retain the godlike position we’ve given it. And I salute any of you who make a decision to devote your live to making love a value.