[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 147 (Monday, October 20, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9732-H9736]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SOCIAL ILLS SEEN AS RUIN OF NATIONS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Nunes). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I was privileged to hear British Prime
Minister Tony Blair speak in this Chamber a few months ago, and one
comment he made particularly caught my attention. He said, ``As Britain
knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact,
it is transitory.'' I think what he was saying is that essentially
nothing lasts forever, including great nations.
History teaches us that, most of the world's great powers are not
overcome by external force, but rather disintegrate internally. And let
us take a quick study of three such examples.
Rome, of course, 2,000 odd years ago, stood astride the then-
civilized world and appeared to be invincible. Yet it fell from
preeminence, and the reasons historians have given us, there was a
general decline in morality, increasing corruption and instability in
leadership, an increasing public addiction to ever more violent public
spectacles, an increase in crime and prostitution, and a populace that
had become more self-absorbed, apathetic, and unwilling to sacrifice
for the common good.
Then, of course, the country that Tony Blair was referring to, Great
Britain, had a colonial empire that dominated much of the world through
[[Page H9733]]
much of the 1800s, and, of course, that empire slowly began to crumble.
The reasons that some have given for this demise was that Great Britain
had lost the national resolve to maintain its territory, values that
led to ascendancy were eroded, spiritual underpinnings were shifted at
some point.
The third example would be the Soviet Union, one of two great super
powers as recently as 20 years ago, and in a matter of months, Russian
disintegrated before our eyes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on this
fall when he observed that, ``Over a half century ago, while I was
still a child, I recall a number of older people offering the following
explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia, men have
forgotten God, that is why all of this has happened.''
And so, Marx and Lenin dismantled Russia's heritage and value system.
Russia's foundation was broken, and it collapsed like a house of cards
with nothing to sustain it.
{time} 2245
These are just three examples. I think there are many others that
history is replete with that show the declines of some great nations,
again without any outside military intervention. I think some of the
common themes that we begin to see are that in cases like these,
citizens are less willing to sacrifice for others and for country,
citizens become more self-absorbed, a greater desire for comfort, for
the state to provide for their welfare, a weakening of commonly held
values and a decline of spiritual commitment in those countries.
What does all this have to do with the United States and our present
situation? I hope I am not overdrawing the case here, but I would have
to say that right now we are certainly on top, we have the most
powerful military, the strongest economy, the most stable government of
any nation in the world and so it is easy to think, as Tony Blair
mentioned, that we are invincible but also as he said, as Britain
knows, all predominant power for a time seems invincible, but in fact
it is transitory. I think that was a well-taken word of warning.
Over 36 years of coaching and dealing with young people, I saw some
very disturbing signs. I am going to take some time this evening to
develop the theme that I saw occurring before my very eyes over that
36-year period that I think certainly bode a sense of warning, at least
as far as I am concerned. The young men that I worked with were more
talented with each year, yet they showed more signs of stress, they had
more personal struggles, and they had less moral clarity as the years
went by.
This chart here to my left reflects at least one alarming trend. In
1960, which was about the time that I started working with young
people, we had roughly 400,000 cases that were referred to the juvenile
courts. In 1999, that figure was well over 1.6 million. I would say
today in 2003, this is the most recent figures that we have, but I
would imagine that by 2002, 2003, the caseload is much higher. That
represents a 400 percent increase. I really do not care what figure you
look at; you will find that the chart looks about like this for issues
such as teen pregnancy, teenage murder, violence, drug and alcohol
abuse involving teenagers and, of course, the divorce rate for seniors
and all the other social pathology that we are so familiar with. I
think there are several factors that contributed to these changes that
we see here. I would say the first major factor is simply some of the
things that have happened to our family structure in the United States.
In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 5 percent. Today it is right
at 33 percent, a 600 percent increase. So roughly one out of three
children coming into our Nation today have basically two strikes
against them and in most cases will not have both a father and mother
to care for them. Some will, but most will not.
In 1960, the great majority of children lived with both biological
parents. Today nearly one-half grow up without both biological parents.
Only 7 percent of today's families are traditional families as we would
normally define it, with usually a father working full-time, a mother
at home full-time or vice versa, but at least one parent being at home
and one parent being the primary provider. This is according to the
Fatherhood Initiative statistics.
So actually in many cases, and as a matter of fact in some cases, in
most cases with our children, nobody is home after 3 p.m., and between
3 and 6 p.m. we find the greatest source of problems, of criminal
activity and so on with our children, because no one is home. Parents
today spend 40 percent less time with their children than they did a
generation ago. The divorce rate, of course, has increased 300 percent
since 1960 and 24 million children today live without their biological
father. Fatherless children are more likely to be abused, have mental
and emotional problems, abuse drugs and alcohol, commit suicide, commit
a crime and be promiscuous.
I think this is graphically driven home when we realize what a
greeting card company did a few years ago when they approached the
prisoners in one of our Federal prisons. It was Mother's Day. They
said, we'll give you prisoners a Mother's Day card free if you'll just
simply send your mother a card and they had almost 100 percent
participation. And so they thought that this was somewhat gratifying.
They thought, well, when Father's Day comes around, we will do the same
thing. They made the same offer with Father's Day cards and as you may
suppose, maybe you would not suppose, there were no takers. That shows
you the devastation, particularly in some of our disaffected
population, that fatherlessness has caused and I think really is at the
root of most of the social pathology that we see in front of us.
The foundation of our culture, the family, is certainly under assault
and we have seen great changes over the last 30 to 40 years. Another
major issue that has contributed to some of the problems that our young
people are dealing with today is that the environment has changed. The
environment that they live and move and have their being in is not the
same as it was back in the 1940s and the 1950s and even the early part
of the 1960s. In 1960, drug abuse was almost unheard of. I know in the
area of the country that I lived in, I had heard the word marijuana, I
had never seen any instances of it, had never heard of cocaine,
methamphetamines, ecstacy and so on; and of course today those drugs
are of somewhat epidemic proportion. Alcohol abuse involving underage
drinking has exploded.
I would like to take a little time right now, Mr. Speaker, to develop
this particular theme because so often we feel in the United States
that the drug problem has to do with hard drugs, but by far the biggest
drug problem that we are facing today with our young people is that of
alcohol. A recent National Academy of Science study that was released,
I believe 2 weeks ago, showed that alcohol kills 6.5 times more
children than all other drugs combined. More than cocaine,
methamphetamine, ecstasy and all of those drugs put together, alcohol
kills 6.5 times more.
Underage drinking costs the U.S. $53 billion annually, 2\1/2\ times
what it is going to cost us to rebuild Iraq. There are more than 3
million teenage alcoholics estimated in our country today. This is by
far the biggest drug problem. The average age of first drink in our
country is currently 12.8 years of age, less than 13 years of age; and
the discouraging thing is that when young people drink, on the average
they will consume almost twice as much alcohol per occurrence as an
adult will. So young people on average tend to drink to get drunk and
they often do. Twenty percent of our eighth graders drink regularly.
Children who drink before age 15 are four times more likely to become
alcoholics because of psychological and physiological immaturity.
Alcohol impacts them much differently when they are 12 and 13 and 14
and 15 years old than it impacts them when they are 24, 25, or 26. And
so there is a great increase in addiction.
The thing that I would really like to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, is
this, that young people for the most part do not start their
experimentation with illegal drugs by using marijuana, they do not
start with cocaine, they do not start with methamphetamine. They start
with alcohol. Therefore, if you really want to stop the abuse of hard
drugs, the important thing to do is start with stopping the abuse of
alcohol with underage drinkers.
[[Page H9734]]
Yet we have really pretty much ignored this whole problem because we
spend more than 25 times as much money on curbing illegal hard drugs as
we do on underage drinking. We spend a minimal amount discouraging
young people from drinking as underaged young people. We spend hundreds
of millions to fight drug production in Afghanistan and Colombia and
around the world and a fraction of that money spent on curbing underage
drinking would be more cost effective. It would dry up the demand. I
think some type of a national advertising program, a national education
program with a fairly large infusion of dollars at the Federal level is
warranted. It would probably help us cure and clear up the drug problem
more than anything else that we could do in this country.
Another issue that is certainly affecting our young people as they
try to weave their way through the environment that they are placed in
is the violence factor. As many people know, the United States is
currently the most violent Nation in the world for young people ages 14
through 23, 24. The second-place country is not even close to us. We
lead the world in homicide rates and suicide rates for young people.
Pornography has exploded. We have over 1 million porn sites on the
Internet. Not 1,000. Not 100,000. We have 1 million porn sites
currently on the Internet. That is unthinkable. I think when the
Internet first began many years ago, no one would have assumed that
this was even possible or probable. And here it is and so nine out of
10 children ages 9 through 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet.
Again, that is nine out of 10 children who are ages 9 through 16 have
viewed pornography. Much of that is hard core pornography, which really
sears an impression into your mind that sometimes you really cannot get
out of it and most of that viewing has been unintentional. It has been
by accident.
We have corporations such as AT&T that have been involved in hard
core pornography. At one time AT&T I think was the gold standard as far
as how a large corporation should be run. Yet we find some of our most
reputable companies involved in this industry which yields profits of
10 to $15 billion a year. And so the profit motive certainly supersedes
any national interest that they might perceive. Such words as Barbie,
Disney, ESPN, at one time my name, would pull up a porn site. And so a
child who innocently wants to do research or look at some information
regarding their hobby will oftimes pull up a porn site, and we do not
seem to be able to do anything about it.
Many of us are dismayed by the way the FCC is regulating obscenity on
the Nation's airwaves. They are the primary arbiter. They are the ones
who are supposed to be the watchdog in this area. According to the
Parents Television Council as of July 23, 2003, the FCC had not fined a
single broadcast station in the United States for airing indecent
material. Also they had not suspended a single license in the United
States for airing indecent material. Not in the entire history of the
FCC have they done anything like this, despite thousands of complaints.
This is something, Mr. Speaker, that absolutely needs to change. Many
of us in this body are attempting to cause the FCC to begin to take
their responsibility seriously.
The Department of Justice has been focusing on eliminating child
pornography but has done relatively little to enforce hard core
Internet obscenity laws. Of course the Department of Justice has had
their hands full, particularly since 9/11. We realize that they have a
very heavy caseload. But we have really petitioned the Department of
Justice to get more active. In the preceding 8 years prior to 2000,
practically nothing was done to enforce obscenity laws in the
Department of Justice, and we feel that we have not seen a whole lot of
action in the last couple of years as well.
Another issue that has been a concern is that of the video game
industry, eight- to 18-year-old children average spending 40 minutes
per day playing video games. Again, 40 minutes a day on the average,
ages 8 through 18. And video games, as most people know, have become
increasingly violent. A recent video game that was displayed to Members
of Congress showed stalking and killing activities that are used on
training films in the military to teach people how to kill people. In
this particular video game, if you were a good shot and you hit
somebody in a vital spot, such as the head, blood spurted and
everything happened; the reward was several frames of pornographic
material.
This is, as far as I am concerned, off the charts. I do not think the
average adult can even conceive of some of the things that our children
are seeing in terms of video games. The average player of video games
is 12 years of age. The Kentucky school shooter who was very effective
and killed several of his classmates had never fired a gun prior to the
day that he took a gun to school, but he had been very proficient in
playing video games, and he had done a lot of firing and shooting in
video games which translated apparently quite well into his activities
on the school ground that day.
Of course much music, some television, many movies are graphic. The
current content would have been impossible to present for public
consumption 30 years ago or even 20 years ago. This is particularly
disturbing to me because I have grandchildren ages 4 through 11. I am
very concerned about the environment that they are moving into and the
things that they are either advertently or inadvertently exposed to
because it certainly has an impact on the way they see the world.
{time} 2300
In addition to some of these issues, I would have to say that our
value system has shifted considerably. Stephen Covey wrote the book
``Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'' several years ago, and the
thing that he noted was this: he said that in the first 150 years of
our country's history, success was primarily defined in terms of
character traits. A successful person was honest, a successful person
was loyal, a successful person was hard working, kind, et cetera,
generous. And then he said something happened about 50, 60 years ago as
he began to survey the literature of our Nation as it had to do with
the issue of success, he noticed that success began to be defined more
and more in terms of material possessions. A successful person was no
longer one who had good character; a successful person was one who had
money; a successful person was one who had power; a successful person
was one who had celebrity. And so today we find that many people who
are labeled successful are really not people of character. They are
people who have material wealth, celebrity, publicity, and so on. So
certainly our value system has switched a great deal. And we have seen
this affect the business world, WorldCom, Enron. We have seen it in the
press. We have seen it in athletics, in the church, and in politics;
and so it is quite concerning as to what effect this has on our culture
at the present time.
The predominant world view that I noticed today, Mr. Speaker, is
something called post-modernism, and what this states, the view of the
world being post-modernism, is that there are no moral absolutes. So
murder is not absolutely wrong. It depends on the circumstance. There
may be cases when this is justified. Adultery is not absolutely wrong.
There may be circumstances in which it is okay. Everything is relative.
It may be okay to dishonor one's father and one's mother. It may be
okay to steal or to lie or to do all of the things that have been taboo
in societies throughout history.
So we have a system of relativism that leaves our young people with
nothing firm to hold on to at the present time; and particularly on the
college campus we will find that post-modernism is currently almost 100
percent holding sway in terms of the minds of our young people.
So, Mr. Speaker, in view of the family breakdown, the decline in our
culture and shifting values, it is an extremely difficult time for our
children. We are asking them to weave their way through a minefield
littered with alcohol and drug abuse, harmful video games, music, TV,
movies, promiscuity games, violent behavior, and broken homes; and we
are asking them to do this with little or no parental guidance in an
ever-shifting value system.
So it is a very difficult time, and I think we need to pay very close
attention to these changes in our family, to these changes in our
environment. And as de Toqueville said, he made an observation that I
thought was rather astute a couple hundred years ago. He
[[Page H9735]]
said: ``America is great because America is good,'' and what he was
doing was he was referring to the large number of churches, civic
clubs, youth groups, and individuals who reach out and help others.
This was somewhat unique to the United States at that time that we
would help those who were less able to help themselves, and we had all
of the different groups who were reaching out, and he had not noticed
that in Europe. He said this is really the key to America's greatness.
So he was referring to the inherent decency of the American people. He
was referring to the strong moral and spiritual underpinning of the
Nation. He was referring to the basic American ethic: ``Do unto to
others as you would have them do unto you.'' So I think the important
thing to remember, that these observations were made 200 years ago, and
I suppose the corollary to his observation would be this: if America is
no longer good, then America may no longer be great.
I am not one who believes that we are not a great country, and I
believe there is a tremendous reservoir of innate goodness in our
country today. But by the same token, I think it is important to point
out that some of the standards and some of the values that have made us
great have slipped considerably.
So one may say, what can be done? This has been a discouraging
picture that I have painted, and sometimes I even hesitate to do this,
but I think it is something that we need to face, we need to talk about
on this floor. So some of the things that can be done in this body and
throughout our culture are as follows: number one, we can do some
things to provide mentoring for some of our young children, and
mentoring is simply providing an adult who cares about the lives of
young persons. So many of our young kids today do not have anyone who
cares for them unconditionally and to have someone who is not a father,
not a mother, not a preacher, not a teacher, no one who has an ax to
grind, is paid to do so, to have a person who is a mentor, who is an
adult who cares enough about someone, to show up and say I care about
you unconditionally, and whatever happens, I am here for you.
It is very powerful in the life of a young person. A mentor is one
who affirms, who says I believe in you, I know you can do it. I think
that this is something that you are capable of. I see great promise in
you. And I saw that in athletics, that if they affirmed a young person,
they ofttimes became that which they did not even know they could be;
and on other hand if they did not affirm them, if they beat them down,
if they are negative, which so many of our kids experience all the
time, it would not be long before that player played down to that
level, and before long he would quit.
And of course a mentor also provides a vision. So many of our young
people simply have no vision of what they could be, that they could go
on to college, that they could do something in electronics, that they
have musical ability. So a mentor is one who guides them in those
directions. Mentoring reduces dropout rates, drug and alcohol abuse,
teenage pregnancy, violence. And the President has proposed $150
million annually over the next 3 years for mentoring initiatives.
Actually, the funding will be about half of that, but it is still much
better than we had in the past.
The National Mentoring Partnership says that roughly 18 million
children in the United States today are badly in need of a mentor, and
yet at the present time we have roughly 2 million who are being
mentors. Roughly one out of every 10 has a mentor. So I think one thing
that could greatly change the shape of our Nation and our future would
be to provide a much more systematic mentoring program, and I think the
President is behind that.
I think some legislation can help. The Internet Gambling Bill, H.R.
2143, is something that I think could be very beneficial. We have a
great many young people, particularly college students, who are
inundated with credit cards. And anymore all one has to do to build a
huge gambling debt is to have a credit card and a computer. So we would
like to shut this practice down because some kids run up a 10, 15,
$20,000 gambling debt in a matter of days; and of course their future
and their credit rating is ruined. So we feel that this would be an
important bill. H.R. 669, Protect Children from Video Game Sex and
Violence Act of 2003, sponsored by the gentleman from California (Mr.
Baca), of which I am a cosponsor, prevents marketing extremely graphic
violent video games to children. We think this would be a step in the
right direction; but, again, we would worry about the courts declaring
it unconstitutional. So I think we need a fundamental shift in court
decisions regarding the first amendment.
I am not a constitutional expert and do not pretend to be so, but I
would like to point out some court cases that have certainly shaped the
course of our Nation's history and its future. In 1996 Congress passed
the Communications Decency Act that made it illegal to send indecent
material to children via the Internet; but in June of 1997, the Supreme
Court overturned portions of the law and, get this, said in the
opinion: ``Indecent material is protected by first amendment.'' So this
was one of the first times, I believe, that the Supreme Court said that
indecent material is okay. The first amendment gives one the ability to
do that, and we are not going to stand in the way of people sending
indecent material to children over the Internet.
{time} 2310
That was a landmark case.
In 1996 also, the Child Pornography Prevention Act outlawed child
pornography, including visual depictions that appeared to be of a
minor. So the issue at hand was this: You cannot have an actual minor
involved in the production of child pornography, but if you use
computer-generated images, which you can not tell whether they are real
or not real, then that type of child pornography is apparently okay,
according to this particular Supreme Court decision.
In October 1998 the Children On-Line Protection Act was signed into
law to prohibit the communication of harmful material to children on
publicly accessible web sites. The Supreme Court's refusal to rule on
the 1988 law prevented the law from being enacted, so we were not able
to protect children who were involved in receiving harmful material on
publicly accessible web sites.
The 106th Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act to
require schools and libraries that receive Federal funds to use
Internet filtering to protect minors from harmful material on the
Internet. In May 2002 a Federal Court declared the law
unconstitutional.
What we have here is free speech is protected for pornographers and,
in some case pedophiles, while women and children are attacked. Roughly
80 to 90 percent of pedophiles and rapists report using pornography,
oft times before they commit an event.
So, some people say, well, what is the big deal? Pornography is
harmless. It does not really have any victim. Yet, if you think about
it, we spend billions of dollars in this country on commercials, and if
those commercials did not change behavior, if what you see and what you
hear and what you read does not change your behavior, then we are
spending billions of dollars unnecessarily. So, obviously, the
pornography industry does have a tremendous impact on behavior and the
environments that our young people exist in.
I would also point out that there have been some issues that have to
do with prayer that are somewhat concerning in our schools. In 1962 the
Supreme Court ruled the following prayer unconstitutional. This was the
landmark decision. This was the particular prayer: ``Almighty God, we
acknowledge our dependence on thee and we beg thy blessings upon us,
our teachers and our country.'' It seemed relatively innocuous and
relatively simple, but that prayer was ruled unconstitutional because
of separation of church and state.
It would appear that many court rulings regarding separation of
church and state have ranged far afield from the intent of our framers
of the Constitution. The First Amendment states, ``Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.''
Of course, most everyone realizes where that came from, the
Constitution, was that this country was founded by people who were
attempting to
[[Page H9736]]
escape from a religious state, the Church of England, so they did not
want a government-sponsored religion which took over the country.
But I think that in the interpretations that we have seen in the
courts, we have ranged far afield from what the Constitution actually
intended. The framers of the Constitution were assumed to be hostile to
expressions of faith in the recent interpretations of the court that we
have seen.
Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the framers of the Constitution,
said this: ``We have been assured, sir,'' and this is his quote, ``In
the sacred writings, that except the Lord build a house, they labor in
vain that build it. I firmly believe this. I also believe that without
his concurring aid, we shall succeed in the political building no
better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little
partial local interests. Our projects will be confounded, and we
ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down future ages. I
therefore beg leave to move that, henceforth, prayers imploring the
assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberation be held in
this assembly every morning before we proceed to business.''
What he was talking about was in this body, on this floor, he was
saying we should have a prayer at the start of business every day. This
is one of the framers of the Constitution. So at this point, both the
House and the Senate begin their business daily with a prayer, and yet
we have moved so far as a Nation away from what Franklin originally
intended.
George Washington said this: ``The propitious smiles of heaven can
never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of
order and right which heaven itself has ordained.''
In assessing the writings of some of the Founding Fathers, David
Barton, an historian, said this: ``Franklin had warned that forgetting
God and imagining that we no longer needed his concurring aid would
result in internal disputes, the decay of the Nation's prestige and
reputation and a diminished national success. Washington had warned
that if religious principles were excluded, the Nation's morality and
political prosperity would suffer. Yet despite such clear words in
cases beginning in 1962, the Supreme Court offered rulings which
eventually divorced the Nation, its schools and its public affairs from
more than three centuries of its heritage. America is now learning
exponentially what both Washington and Franklin knew to be true. We are
suffering in the very areas they predicted.''
I think it is important that the Founding Fathers really did not
intend for the pendulum to swing as far as it has. I think that they
obviously acknowledged the importance of issues of faith, and this was
the foundation upon which the Nation was built.
There are some other decisions that I think are worth looking at. In
1992 a Supreme Court decision declared an invocation and benediction at
a graduation ceremony constitutional, so a preacher, a rabbi, a Muslim
cleric, cannot at a graduation exercise lead any type of prayer. That
was decided in 1992.
The court also has held more recently a minute of silence in school
is unconstitutional, so at the beginning of the classroom day it is not
constitutional for a minute of silence to be held in which a child may
choose to pray in his own way. He may look out the window, he may think
about his history lesson, but it is just a minute of silence. There is
no formal, organized prayer, no one is proselytizing, and yet that has
become unconstitutional.
Then this, one of the strangest rulings that I heard of, was the
court ruled that a student-led prayer at a football game was
unconstitutional. This is not inside the school building, it is not a
school administrator, it is not a teacher; this was a prayer that was
chosen to be selected by the students, and a student was going to lead
the prayer. Yet this was unconstitutional because the football players
might have to listen to it and might be offended, I guess.
Of course, most recently, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck
down the term ``under God'' from the Pledge of Allegiance, and that
will now be heard by the Supreme Court, probably within the next few
months, and it appears that those are there is a very strong
probability that this may be a four-to-four deadlock, which means that
the Ninth Circuit Court will be upheld and that will become the law of
the land, at least for that part of the country.
Certainly I am not advocating here that teachers or administrators be
allowed to proselytize in the schools. I do not think that would be
appropriate. I do not think that is intended. But it does seem that we
have come a long, long ways from where the framers of the Constitution
originally intended us to go.
The Constitution is increasingly being interpreted as a ``living
document.'' That sounds really good, does it not, because it is kind of
progressive. It sounds like we are forward-thinking and the
Constitution is not a dead piece of legislation, but it is currently
alive and it is being changed and it is moving ahead.
Yet the important thing to realize is that the Constitution is often
not interpreted as it was written, but rather as justices believe that
it should be. Look at the legal decisions increasingly coming down,
based not upon what the law states, but based upon the personal
ideology of the jurists.
The Constitution is not based upon absolute principles, but rather
the shifting sands of relativism. This philosophical bent of the
Supreme Court justices and District Court justices determines the
course of the Nation.
Over the last 20 or 30 years we have seen the Nation slowly but
surely driven in certain directions that many people would believe is
not what the framers of the Constitution intended. That, Mr. Speaker,
is why the activities in the other body regarding the makeup of the
courts and the court appointees is becoming such an important issue,
because, within the next 1 or 2 or 3 years, the shape of the Supreme
Court certainly will be determined, and, with it, the direction that
our Nation proceeds over the next 15, 20, 30 years I think will largely
be decided.
The willingness of Congress to focus upon the pernicious influences
impacting our children, the willingness of the American people to
demand that those profiteering at the expense of our culture and our
young people be reined in, will largely shape the future of our Nation.
{time} 2320
Terrorism is an ever-present threat. The economy is of concern.
However, terrorism and economic distress will not prevail as long as
our national character is sound. I would like to say that one more
time. There is certainly no intent on my part to minimize the critical
nature of terrorism, the crisis in the Middle East, the situation in
Iraq, the difficulties with the economy, health care, Medicare, all of
those types of things. Those are critical issues and they occupy almost
100 percent of this body's attention. But the reason I am here tonight
is to try to point out the fact that we will handle all of those
problems. None of those problems will overcome the United States if our
character is sound, if our young people are nurtured in the right
direction.
And, therefore, something that I think is very pernicious is slipping
under the radar screen and something that this Congress, this body, and
the American people need to address on a consistent manner. So this
struggle may present the most critical crisis facing the United States
today.
As Congress addresses important issues such as national defense,
economy, health care, and so on, it is critical that we not lose sight
of the fact that our Nation's survival is directly linked to the
character of our people.
I would conclude by saying this our future rests with our young
people and with the soundness of their character, their willingness to
sacrifice, and their spiritual grounding. And I hope that we will give
adequate attention to these issues some of which can be handled through
legislation, some through expenditures of money, for instance, in the
trying to prevent underage drinking, some in our attention to who goes
on to the courts and who does not, but above all this really rests with
the American people and with their willingness to persevere.
And I would like to echo what de Tocqueville said, ``America is great
because America is good.'' And I think we need to maintain our
vigilance that America continues to be good.
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