[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]
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.''
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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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