Our fortunes and our prosperity also depend upon our ability to answer some
questions from within--from the values and voices that speak to our hearts
as well as our heads, voices that tell us we have to do more to accept
responsibility for ourselves and our families, for our communities, and
yes, for our fellow citizens.
We see our families and our communities all over this country coming apart.
And we feel the common ground shifting from under us. The PTA, the town
hall meeting, the ball park--it's hard for a lot of overworked parents to
find the time and space for those things that strengthen the bonds of trust
and cooperation.
Too many of our children don't even have parents and grandparents who can
give them those experiences that they need to build their own character and
their sense of identity. We all know that while we here in this chamber can
make a difference on those things, that the real differences will be made
by our fellow citizens where they work and where they live.
And it'll be made almost without regard to party. When I used to go to the
softball park in Little Rock to watch my daughter's league and people would
come up to me--fathers and mothers--and talk to me, I can honestly say I
had no idea whether 90 percent of them were Republicans or Democrats.
When I visited the relief centers after the floods in California, Northern
California, last week, a woman came up to me and did something that very
few of you would do. She hugged me and said, "Mr. President, I'm a
Republican, but I'm glad you're here."
Now, why? We can't wait for disasters to act the way we used to act every
day. Because as we move into this next century, everybody matters. We don't
have a person to waste. And a lot of people are losing a lot of chances to
do better.
That means that we need a New Covenant for everybody--for our corporate
and business leaders, we're going to work here to keep bringing the deficit
down, to expand markets, to support their success in every possible way.
But they have an obligation: when they're doing well, to keep jobs in our
communities and give their workers a fair share of the prosperity they
generate.
For people in the entertainment industry in this country, we applaud your
creativity and your worldwide success and we support your freedom of
expression but you do have a responsibility to assess the impact of your
work and to understand the damage that comes from the incessant,
repetitive, mindless violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our
media all the time.
We've got to ask our community leaders and all kinds of organizations to
help us stop our most serious social problem: the epidemic of teen
pregnancies and births where there is no marriage. I have sent to Congress
a plan to target schools all over this country with anti-pregnancy programs
that work. But government can only do so much. Tonight, I call on parents
and leaders all across this country to join together in a national campaign
against teen pregnancy to make a difference. We can do this and we must.
And I would like to say a special word to our religious leaders. You know,
I'm proud of the fact that the United States has more house of worship per
capita than any country in the world. These people, who lead our houses of
worship, can ignite their congregations to carry their faith into action,
can reach out to all of our children, to all of the people in distress, to
those who have been savaged by the breakdown of all we hold dear, because
so much of what must be done must come from the inside out. And our
religious leaders and their congregations can make all the difference. They
have a role in the New Covenant as well.
There must be more responsibility for all of our citizens. You know it
takes a lot of people to help all the kids in trouble stay off the streets
and in school. It takes a lot of people to build the Habitat for Humanity
houses that the Speaker celebrates on his lapel pin. It takes a lot of
people to provide the people power for all the civic organizations in this
country that made our communities mean so much to most of us when we were
kids. It takes every parent to teach the children the difference between
right and wrong and to encourage them to learn and grow and to say no to
the wrong things but also to believe that they can be whatever they want to
be.
I know it's hard when you're working harder for less, when you're under
great stress, to do these things. A lot of our people don't have the time
or the emotional stress they think to do the work of citizenship. Most of
us in politics haven't helped very much. For years, we've mostly treated
citizens like they were consumers or spectators, sort of political couch
potatoes who were supposed to watch the TV ads--either promise them
something for nothing or play on their fears and frustrations. And more and
more of our citizens now get most of their information in very negative and
aggressive ways that is hardly conducive to honest and open conversations.
But the truth is we have got to stop seeing each other as enemies just
because we have different views.
If you go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of
America, as de Tocqueville pointed out when he came here a long time ago,
has always been our ability to associate with people who were different
from ourselves and to work together to find common ground. And in this day
everybody has a responsibility to do more of that. We simply cannot wait
for a tornado, a fire or a flood to behave like Americans ought to behave
in dealing with one another.
I want to finish up here by pointing out some folks that are up with the
First Lady that represent what I'm trying to talk about. Citizens. I have
no idea what their party affiliation is or who they voted for in the last
election, but they represent what we ought to be doing.
Cindy Perry teaches second-graders to read in AmeriCorps in rural Kentucky.
She gains when she gives. She's a mother of four.
She says that her service inspired her to get her high school equivalency
last year. She was married when she was a teen-ager. Stand up, Cindy. She
married when she was a teen-ager. She had four children, but she had time
to serve other people, to get her high school equivalency and she's going
to use her AmeriCorps money to go back to college.
Steven Bishop is the police chief of Kansas City. He's been a national
leader--stand up Steve. He's been a national leader in using more police
in community policing and he's worked with AmeriCorps to do it, and the
crime rate in Kansas City has gone down as a result of what he did.
Cpl. Gregory Depestre went to Haiti as part of his adopted country's force
to help secure democracy in his native land. And I might add we must be the
only country in the world that could have gone to Haiti and taken
Haitian-Americans there who could speak the language and talk to the
people, and he was one of them and we're proud of him.
The next two folks I've had the honor of meeting and getting to know a
little bit. The Rev. John and the Rev. Diana Cherry of the A.M.E. Zion
Church in Temple Hills, Md. I'd like to ask them to stand. I want to tell
you about them. In the early 80's they left Government service and formed a
church in a small living room in a small house in the early 80's. Today
that church has 17,000 members. It is one of the three or four biggest
churches in the entire United States. It grows by 200 a month.
They do it together. And the special focus of their ministry is keeping
families together. They are--Two things they did make a big impression on
me. I visited their church once and I learned they were building a new
sanctuary closer to the Washington, D.C., line, in a higher-crime,
higher-drug-rate area because they thought it was part of their ministry to
change the lives of the people who needed them. Second thing I want to say
is that once Reverend Cherry was at a meeting at the White House with some
other religious leaders and he left early to go back to his church to
minister to 150 couples that he had brought back to his church from all
over America to convince them to come back together to save their marriages
and to raise their kids. This is the kind of work that citizens are doing
in America. We need more of it and it ought to be lifted up and supported.
The last person I want to introduce is Jack Lucas from Hattiesburg,
Mississippi. Jack, would you stand up. Fifty years ago in the sands of Iwo
Jima, Jack Lucas taught and learned the lessons of citizenship. On February
the 20th, 1945, he and three of his buddies encountered the enemy and two
grenades at their feet. Jack Lucas threw himself on both of them. In that
moment he saved the lives of his companions and miraculously in the next
instant a medic saved his life. He gained a foothold for freedom and at the
age of 17, just a year older than his grandson, who's up there with him
today, and his son, who is a West Point graduate and a veteran, at 17, Jack
Lucas became the youngest marine in history and the youngest soldier in
this century to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. All these years
later, yesterday, here's what he said about that day: Didn't matter where
you were from or who you were. You relied on one another. You did it for
your country. We all gain when we give and we reap what we sow. That's at
the heart of this New Covenant. Responsibility, opportunity and
citizenship.
More than stale chapters in some remote civic book they're still the virtue
by which we can fulfill ourselves and reach our God-given potential and be
like them. And also to fulfill the eternal promise of this country, the
enduring dream from that first and most-sacred covenant. I believe every
person in this country still believes that we are created equal and given
by our creator the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is a very, very great country and our best days are still to come.
Thank you and God bless you all.
***
State of the Union Address
William J. Clinton
January 23, 1996
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of the 104th Congress,
distinguished guests, my fellow Americans all across our land:
Let me begin tonight by saying to our men and women in uniform around the
world, and especially those helping peace take root in Bosnia and to their
families, I thank you. America is very, very proud of you.
My duty tonight is to report on the state of the Union--not the state of
our government, but of our American community; and to set forth our
responsibilities, in the words of our Founders, to form a more perfect
union.
The state of the Union is strong. Our economy is the healthiest it has been
in three decades. We have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and
inflation in 27 years. We have created nearly 8 million new jobs, over a
million of them in basic industries, like construction and automobiles.
America is selling more cars than Japan for the first time since the 1970s.
And for three years in a row, we have had a record number of new businesses
started in our country.
Our leadership in the world is also strong, bringing hope for new peace.
And perhaps most important, we are gaining ground in restoring our
fundamental values. The crime rate, the welfare and food stamp rolls, the
poverty rate and the teen pregnancy rate are all down. And as they go down,
prospects for America's future go up.
We live in an age of possibility. A hundred years ago we moved from farm to
factory. Now we move to an age of technology, information, and global
competition. These changes have opened vast new opportunities for our
people, but they have also presented them with stiff challenges. While more
Americans are living better, too many of our fellow citizens are working
harder just to keep up, and they are rightly concerned about the security
of their families.