[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 129 (Wednesday, November 15, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H8665-H8668]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1245
                         RECENT VISIT TO ISRAEL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, 2 weeks ago I visited Israel, spent about 
12 days there, and traveled the whole country. We started in the 
northern part, up around Caesaria Phillipi, went down to Elat on the 
Red Sea, went to Jerusalem, went to Tel Aviv, talked to the people, and 
had a very good feel for what actually is going on there.
  So often on CODELs we are in a country for 24 hours, 36 hours, and we 
move on. And this was a little different. And so at the present time, 
obviously, people know that Israel is in a very difficult spot. 
Recently they had a war involving Hezbollah on their northern border. 
And the Hezbollah was located in Lebanon, southern part of it, and 
fired hundreds, if not thousands, of Katyusha missiles into Israel, 
particularly the northern part of Israel. And yet, as we visited that 
part of the country, it was almost untouched, it seemed. They had 
repaired, they had restored, and life was going on as usual only a 
couple, 3 weeks after the conflict had ended.
  As many people know, Hamas is very powerful in Gaza and in the West 
Bank and has tremendous influence in the Palestinian areas. At the 
present time, there are rockets being fired by the Hamas people down in 
Gaza, into Israel.
  So as we watch this and as we watch the continual conflict with the 
Palestinians and the desire for the Palestinians to have a unified 
state, unifying the West Bank, on the west bank of the Jordan and in 
the Gaza Strip down in the southwestern part of the country, you can 
see that Israel is under tremendous pressure.
  Yet, the thing that was rather impressive was the staying power, the 
resolve, the willingness of the Israelis to try to see this through. I 
guess the lessons that I took away from this, and the concerns, were 
that, obviously, it is important that the United States have that same 
staying power, that same will to pull together, that same willingness 
to survive in the face of adversity.
  Because even though we are protected by two great oceans, the world 
has shrunk. Today we are not as secure as we once were. We face a true 
global conflict over the horizon. Many of the things that we observed 
in Israel, I think, apply to us, even though sometimes we are not aware 
of it.
  Tony Blair made an interesting observation here recently. He stated 
that peace in the Middle East will be hard to come by unless Israel and 
the Palestinians and Hamas and Hezbollah can somehow resolve their 
differences. I believe that is very true.
  Our focus is on Iraq here in the United States, sometimes on 
Afghanistan. But at the heart of much of the conflict and much of the 
turmoil in the Middle East is the conflict that involves terrorist 
organizations and Israel. I am not here to be partisan and take 
Israel's side versus another nation's side. I am simply pointing these 
issues out that I think are very important.
  The things that I mentioned that particularly impressed me about the 
Israelis were, number one, a willingness to persevere in the face of 
great adversity, and people realize what the terrorists are attempting 
to do. But also not far away is Iran, and the Iranian president has 
basically said that he would like to destroy Israel, and everyone knows 
that at the present time it does appear that Iran is trying to build 
nuclear capabilities. This is a very tenuous situation as far as Israel 
is concerned. Despite these threats, as I mentioned, Israel seems to be 
staying the course, seems to have great resolve, and I would hope that 
we would have the same resolve in our country in terms of persevering 
in the face of adversity.
  The second thing that I took away from that trip to Israel that I 
think is important, that may have some applicability to our situation 
here in the United States, is a sense on the part of the Israelis of 
having great unity of purpose, a willingness to pull together, a 
willingness to avoid all fragmentation. I guess when your back is to 
the wall and you are not very big, you realize that unity of purpose is 
critical. So we certainly detected that.
  I guess I can relate a little bit to my previous experience in the 
athletic arena in regard to the importance of unity of purpose. A team 
of great athletes which was polarized and which was divided was not 
able to accomplish a great deal; and yet a team with less talent which 
had unity of purpose would usually prevail over a superior

[[Page H8666]]

team physically that was divided almost every time.
  So the analogy that I would like to draw at this present time are 
some things that I have observed, as I leave this body, and this has to 
do really with the recent election. We certainly experienced a very 
contentious election. We saw a great deal of partisanship; accusations 
were numerous and sometimes very destructive. There were deep divisions 
that were very apparent between the two parties.
  The general public, at least the public that I dealt with in rural 
and central parts of America, watched the acrimony and the name-calling 
with a great deal of dismay and sometimes disgust. And to a significant 
degree, I believe, the political process and Congress in particular is 
viewed with a great deal of mistrust and skepticism at the present 
time. At the root of that, I think, was some of the dialogue that they 
saw occur in the last several months.
  It seems to me, as I talked to my constituents, and people around the 
country, that the public is counting on us to lead, to unite, to serve 
the best interests of the country, rather than to point fingers and to 
seek to destroy the opposition. I think that from this election some 
lessons can be drawn. Which way this Congress goes, I am not certain, 
but I at least have some wishes, I have some desires, which I will try 
to convey.
  I guess the majority in the House and the Senate now has changed. It 
definitely has. This presents two opportunities: number one, an 
opportunity for the new majority to pay back those who were in the 
majority for either real or perceived slights and offenses. But the 
second approach can be something that I think would be more 
constructive, is a chance to change the political climate, to foster a 
more cooperative governing style and certainly something that would 
restore a good deal of confidence on the part of the American people.
  I think there are three major factors that people continually point 
to in regard to the last election, and the two, the first two, have 
been given preeminence.
  First of all, Iraq, the conflict over there, the fact that many 
Americans have grown weary of it; many Americans have decided that we 
are on the wrong course. To be honest about it, I don't think that the 
Congress has a tremendous amount of control over what is happening in 
Iraq. We have some. We can control funding, and we can make comments 
here, but we really aren't the generals on the ground. So that really 
may be a little bit out of our element to some degree.
  The second area is the area of ethics, and the fact that many people 
were very upset with corrupt practices that had occurred on the part of 
a small number of people but still a number of our Members, and that 
this is something that Congress definitely does have directly in its 
purview. We did some reforms, but not enough, I don't believe, in the 
last few months. And I believe that Congress, Members of Congress, 
members of the Senate, have to be above reproach. As Joe Paterno one 
time said, we cannot only be fair; we have to appear to be fair. We 
cannot have the perception even of wrong-doing.
  As I sat in meeting after meeting after meeting over 6 years, I can't 
really remember anyone getting up and really addressing the issue of 
ethics and how important this is in preserving the trust of the 
American people. It is something that this body obviously has to do a 
better job with, and I hope that it will become a major priority here.
  Then the third thing, which many of the pundits have not referred to 
very often, has simply been the issue of partisan bickering, which I 
think would serve us very well to get over to some degree, and it will 
be interesting to see how that develops as time goes on.
  The most hopeful time that I had during my 6 years in Congress was 
also maybe the worst time, and that was the 3 or 4 months right after 
9/11, and almost everyone here can remember those times. We can 
remember the horror that we felt as we saw the Pentagon destroyed, the 
Twin Towers go down, the plane crash over Pennsylvania, and the fact 
that we realized all of a sudden that as a Nation we were vulnerable. 
That was a terrible time, and there was a lot of rebuilding to do.

  At the same time, it was a very hopeful time, because, for 3 months, 
maybe 4 months, here in this Chamber and over in the Senate, we saw 
Congress work together, pull together to display a unity of purpose 
that I had not seen before or since. It showed what we were capable of 
doing as a body, as a unified organization.
  So, as time goes by and as that memory of 9/11 begins to fade, it is 
easy to begin to become complacent again and decide that the most 
important thing is party supremacy.
  So I would hope that people would realize that even though we have 
not been attacked for the last 5 years, that attack is still on the 
horizon; that this is still a world that is very, very combustible at 
the present time. We really do need to pull together in a way that we 
have not done for the last 5 years.
  Cervantes once said something that was rather important to me in my 
outlook on life. He said, ``The journey is more important than the 
end.'' A very brief statement. He said, ``The journey is more important 
than the end.''
  What he was saying is that the process that we go through, the way we 
do things, how we do things, why we do things, is really more important 
than the end result. Sometimes that is easy to say, but it is really 
hard to live with, because losing an election is very difficult. I have 
experienced that. Losing a football game is very difficult. Losing a 
business is very difficult.
  But what he was saying is, you know, the process is more important 
than all of that. The process is more important than whether you win or 
whether you lose. You do things in a certain way, and you do them every 
time, and in the long run, that will be the most important thing.
  That is why I point to the fact that doing things the right way here 
and unity of purpose is going to be very important. This week there 
will be a big football game; Ohio State is going to play Michigan. One 
team will prevail. They are both undefeated. I don't know which team is 
going to win.
  But I do know this: The deciding factor will probably be something 
that was overlooked in the preparation, something that has been laying 
there for the last 9 or 10 weeks unaddressed.
  It may be a fumble. The back doesn't carry the ball high and tight. 
He flags the ball, something that should have been addressed. It may be 
an extra point where a guy isn't stepping with his right foot. And all 
of a sudden, he gets blown off the ball, and somebody blocks an extra 
point or somebody blocks a punt. It may be fatigue in the fourth 
quarter; conditioning that wasn't undertaken that should have been 
done.
  Often, that which is ignored which does not seem to be very important 
or very apparent all of a sudden, in a crisis, becomes critical. That 
is the way it is with our country at the present time. I feel that 
there is something that we really are not paying adequate attention to. 
It is like how you carry the football. It is like blocking. It is like 
punt protection. Those kinds of things that are little don't seem to 
make a lot of difference, but all of sudden it jumps up and bites you.
  The greatest threat facing the United States as I see it at the 
present time is something that we need to pay attention to, and that is 
our young people, because young people are the future.
  There was a study that was released today by America's Promise, the 
organization that was headed up for many years by Colin Powell, still 
very active, and his wife. They did a research report which released 
some information that I thought was very revealing. It said, there are 
really five things that a young person needs to have to grow up and be 
productive and to be healthy and to help make this country work.
  They said, these five promises are: number one, caring adults in that 
young person's life, and 40 percent of our young people indicated at 
the present time that they either don't have any or don't have enough. 
One out of five young people indicate that they do not have a single 
caring adult in their life, somebody that really cares for them as they 
are.
  Number two, a safe place and a constructive use of time. And a 
tremendous number of our kids go home to homes that are not safe 
because of abuse. They live in neighborhoods that, because of gangs or 
violence or whatever, are not safe. Again, that is a major problem: a 
healthy start and

[[Page H8667]]

healthy development. Many of our young people grow up without adequate 
medical care, medical attention, and as a result, they don't in the 
first 3 or 4 or 5 years of life have an even start, and this, again, is 
a tremendous handicap.
  Effective education; 25 percent of our young people don't complete 
high school. Many of them who do complete high school are not 
adequately prepared for the world of work, and we are falling behind in 
many areas internationally in terms of our education.
  Then, opportunity to serve other people, to give something of 
themselves. So the interesting thrust of this whole research study, it 
was interesting, indicated that 31 percent of our children have either 
four or five of these essential ingredients, and the conclusion of the 
study is that these 31 percent will be pretty well prepared.
  These 31 percent will do pretty well with the rest of their lives. 
But then they said, you know, 48 percent have only two or three of 
these factors, and they have a chance, but they are kind of on the 
bubble.

                              {time}  1300

  If you only have two or three of those five ingredients going in your 
life, you are somewhat crippled, and you may be fortunate and you may 
make it, but you may be less than fortunate and you may not make it.
  Then the critical thing was, they said 21 percent have only one of 
those factors, or they have zero, so 21 percent, one out of every five, 
of our children is at tremendous risk of not being a productive adult, 
of having a life that is certainly not what it could be. So it is 
important that we focus on this and understand how important this is. 
One in 12 of our young people today attempts suicide. So there is a 
certain desperation out there.
  I would like to now turn to something that Prime Minister Tony Blair 
of Britain said on this floor about 3 years ago, which I think is 
somewhat germane, that relates to what I have been talking about with 
our young people, with our divisions in Congress and so on. He said, 
``As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, 
but in fact it is transient.'' So what he was saying is that every 
great nation for a period of time has assumed that it was going to live 
forever, that things were not going to change, that it would be 
preeminent forever, and then eventually realized that this power that 
they had, this aura of invincibility, all of a sudden was not there 
anymore. So I think that there is no question as we look at history 
that what he said is very true.
  I would like to just take a quick cursory look at three nations that 
certainly would have fit that category he was talking about, nations 
that were invincible at the time. Certainly Rome 2,000 years ago ruled 
the entire civilized world, appeared to be invincible, but eventually 
fell from preeminence. The reasons historians have given that they fell 
were, number one, a general decline in morality; an increase in 
corruption and instability in leadership; an increasing public 
addiction to ever-more-violent public spectacles; an increase in crime 
and prostitution; and above all, a population that became more self-
absorbed, apathetic and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good.
  Does that fit any of our parameters here? I don't know, but it 
certainly is something we need to be aware of and we need to think 
about to some degree.
  Great Britain 150 years ago dominated the world, had a colonial 
empire that dominated the world from the late 1600s through much of the 
1800s, yet this British Empire eventually slowly crumbled. The reasons 
given by historians are as follows: Number one, they lost the national 
resolve to maintain their territory. It takes a lot of energy and 
commitment to maintain far-flung colonies around the world. Next, 
values that led to ascendency were eroded. The integrity, the character 
of the people, somehow was no longer what it once had been. Spiritual 
underpinnings began to shift. Some the spiritual values were no longer 
there.
  Russia, 20 years ago one of the great nations of the world, one of 
the two superpowers at that time, in a matter of months disintegrated 
before our eyes. Alexander Solzhenitzen reflected on this fall when he 
observed this. He said, ``Over a half century ago while I was still a 
child, I recall a number of older people offered the following 
explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia.'' Then he 
quotes. ``Men have forgotten God. That is why all of this has 
happened.'' That is what he found many people in Russia saying. Marx 
and Lenin had dismantled Russia's religious heritage, values had 
fallen, Russia's foundation was broken, and eventually it collapsed 
like a house of cards with nothing to sustain it.
  So if you look at these three nations, which I just picked out 
randomly, there are really some common themes of historical collapse. 
Number one, citizens are less willing to sacrifice for other people and 
for their country; number two, citizens become more self-absorbed, they 
have a greater desire for the state to take care of them; number three, 
a weakening of commonly held values; and number four, the decline of 
spiritual commitment.
  I think there are some warnings here, some things we might think 
about, some things that may be applicable to our country and to this 
body here.
  We currently have the most powerful military, the strongest economy, 
the most stable government of any nation in the world, and so it is 
easy at times to think that we are invincible, that this will go on 
forever. But as Tony Blair stated, ``As Britain knows, all predominant 
power for a time seems invincible, but in fact it is transient.''
  I think it is our job here in this body and in this country to see to 
it that it doesn't become transient, at least not real soon; that we 
are able to preserve the integrity and identity of our country that has 
been so important.
  In over 36 years of coaching, I witnessed firsthand some trends that 
were concerning to me. I noticed over that 36 years that the young men 
who came into the program became, over time, more troubled. They were 
people who showed more stress. They had less moral clarity as time 
passed.
  When I started coaching in 1962, I think most of the players I dealt 
with knew that it was wrong to tell a lie. They knew that stealing 
something was wrong; it was just something that was a given. And yet, 
as time goes on, we ran into something called postmodernism, the idea 
that everything is relative, there are no moral absolutes. As a result, 
if you can get away with something, it may be okay.
  That has become a rather pervasive theme in our country and 
particularly in our institutions of higher education, the idea of 
postmodernism. As a result, I saw young men who were a little more 
troubled, a little less stable, and I think there are really two major 
factors behind this.
  First of all, family stability has certainly eroded. I saw that 
because when I first recruited players and went into their homes in the 
1960s and the early 1970s, it was rather rare to see a young person who 
did not have both parents, and if you saw somebody with only one 
parent, it was usually because one parent or the other was deceased. 
But as time went on and as I wrapped up my coaching career in the late 
1990s, roughly one-half of the young people that we were dealing with 
had grown up without both biological parents. One parent or other had 
simply taken off, a divorce or something had occurred; so that 
certainly left some tremendous scars.
  In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 5 percent. Today, it is 
around 36 percent. About one out of every three children is born 
outside of marriage. Less than a quarter of families with children 
under the age of 6 have a parent staying home with them full-time. One-
third of all school-age children come home to an empty house for at 
least part of the week, and the hours between 3 and 6 p.m., of course, 
are the greatest hours of risk for young children.
  Then, the last thing I will mention here, 24 million children in the 
United States live without their real father. So being fatherless is a 
huge problem in our country today, and those young people who are 
fatherless are two to three more times likely to be abused, have 
emotional behavior problems, abuse drugs and alcohol, commit a crime 
and so on.
  There is a greeting card company that went to a prison on Mother's 
Day and offered to give free greeting cards to every inmate who would 
want one to send to his mother. They had almost 100 percent 
participation. Almost every

[[Page H8668]]

inmate of that prison decided that they wanted to send a Mother's Day 
card to their mother.

  They had so much success, the greeting card company came back on 
Father's Day and they made the same offer. They had practically zero 
participation.
  You say, well, what in the world happened here? The thing was that 
the great majority, almost all of the men in that prison, did not have 
a father. Their father had simply abandoned them, probably early in 
life, and as a result they were not interested at all in sending them a 
card.
  Certainly the family structure has changed in our country, and I 
think we have to pay attention to that. We have to buttress it as much 
as we can. We can't legislate a lot of these things, but we can 
certainly attempt to do something about it.
  The second thing that I will address, and this will be the last thing 
I will talk about, is the fact that the environment that our young 
people are now growing up in has certainly changed as well. The family, 
the launching pad, has changed, has become less stable, and the 
environment into which we are thrusting our young people has certainly 
become more difficult, has become more challenging, has become more 
dangerous, and, as a result, we have seen some major changes.
  One thing that I was very proud to see this House address yesterday 
was the matter of underage drinking. This has become a huge problem in 
our Nation, and we did pass the STOP bill yesterday. I don't know if we 
will get if done in the Senate or not. I hope we will. It simply made 
an attempt to do something about the ravages of underage drinking. I 
will just present a few interesting details regarding underage 
drinking.
  A recent National Academy of Sciences study showed that alcohol kills 
six-and-a-half times more children than all other drugs combined. So if 
you look at cocaine, if you look at heroin, marijuana and on and on, 
and you combine all of those, alcohol kills six-and-a-half times more 
children, more than 4,000 a year, which is a huge number. It costs the 
United States $53 billion annually. There are currently 3 million 
teenage alcoholics. So it is by far the biggest drug problem we have.
  The average age for the first drink of a young person who decides to 
use alcohol before age 21 is 12.8 years of age. When you start using 
alcohol that young, that early in your life, it makes a huge difference 
because of your psychological and your physiological immaturity. A 
young person who starts drinking before age 15 is five times more 
likely to become an alcoholic than one who waits until they are 21 
years of age.
  Anyway, this body has done something about this, not probably enough, 
but at least it is a good start, and I was proud to see that happen 
yesterday.
  Another drug that is particularly pernicious and is spreading like 
wildfire across the country is methamphetamine. Many places will find 
that the rates of use of heroin and cocaine are going down rather 
dramatically, and the reason for that is methamphetamine is moving in.
  Methamphetamine is cheaper and methamphetamine is much more 
addictive, so it is sweeping across the country. It started in 
California and has slowly moved across, and now there is a pocket up in 
the northeastern part of the country where we don't see much of it, but 
through the Midwest, through the South, through most of the rest of the 
country, it has become pretty much a tidal wave. So we have been very 
concerned about this.
  We find that in Nebraska roughly 22,000 people, according to a recent 
report, are addicted in a State of only 1.7 million. The average meth 
addict will cost society about $50,000 a year, so in Nebraska it is 
about a $1 billion a year problem, and nationally it is huge. It is 
eating up a huge amount of our money at the present time.
  So we did again make some attempt to address that here, the Combat 
Meth Act was important, and I think maybe the most important part of 
that bill was that we did something to try to regulate sudafedrine, 
which absolutely is necessary in order to produce methamphetamine.
  There are only about six or seven countries in the world that produce 
sudafedrine, and so what we did in that bill was, we said those 
countries that produce sudafedrine and ship it to other countries will 
need to give the United States invoices of where those shipments of 
sudafedrine are going, which enables us then to track the sudafedrine 
to the ``superlabs,'' which are mostly in Mexico; and we think that is 
the most helpful way we have of getting at some of those superlabs that 
are shipping about 80 to 90 percent of the methamphetamine into the 
United States.
  These are some things that have been done.
  Of course, we realize that we have a huge problem with pornography 
and some of video games that are affecting our young people and so on. 
I will not try to outline all of these, but I just want to mention the 
fact that I believe that it is important that we, as a body, as a 
Congress, pay attention to what is going on with our young people, 
because if we don't, if we fail to address those issues, it is a little 
bit like a football team ignoring something that eventually will catch 
up with you.
  As Tony Blair mentioned, ``The long-term well-being of a nation is 
served well only when you pay attention to the next generation.''

                              {time}  1315

  And we have a lot of warning signs out there that we are beginning to 
slip, that we have not paid adequate attention, that the next 
generation coming up may not be able to carry the ball, so to speak. So 
I hope that that will be a major concern and a major thrust in this 
body as we move forward.
  It has been a pleasure for me to be here for the last 6 years. A lot 
of great friends, both sides of the aisle. It has been very challenging 
at times, and I see great potential. I do hope that we will pull 
together and hope that we will serve the Nation as best we can as time 
moves forward.

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