An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: Are you optimistic?

LR: Am I optimistic for our species? Absolutely. Am I optimistic about Iraq? Yeah. It’s absolutely going to get better? Am I optimistic about the next two years in Iraq? No, I’m just sick at the notion that I can’t see things getting better in the next year.

ePulse: Thank you very much for sharing your words with me and with medical students the world over.

LR: I hope that medical students the world over will do better than my generation has at convincing the world how obscene war is. It is so crazy that we could have hundred of thousands of people that were willing to get together to go over there and invade Iraq. And to the best of my knowledge there was only one American who stayed there to work as a health worker to benefit the Iraqis during that process and he was working for the Red Cross.

What does that say about us as a society? That we can easily marshall two hundred thousand to go kill and only one out of three hundred million is inspired to go save?

ePulse: Not much.

LR: Well, it’s been a pleasure.

ePulse: Thank you. Again, thank you.

Les Roberts is an Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health in the Program on Forced Migration and Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Joshua Cook teaches Algebra in South Los Angeles.