    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [April 2, 1993]
    [Pages 386-387]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Concluding the First Roundtable Discussion of the Forest
    Conference in Portland
    April 2, 1993

        I'm going to refrain until the afternoon session from getting into
    the specifics of what we ought to do. But I'd like to say something to
    the people who were on this panel that talked

    [[Page 387]]

    about the human impact of the present conditions.
        Mr. Espy and I are neighbors, and we share a border of the
    Mississippi River. For almost all the history of this country our two
    States were the poorest States in America. When agriculture collapsed
    there in and after the Great Depression, the people who loved my State
    more than life were forced to leave in huge numbers. As a matter of
    fact, it's the only way I got elected President. Every third voter in
    Illinois and Michigan and in the inland empire in California was from
    Arkansas. [Laughter] But it bespoke a terrible inability to manage a
    process of change so that people could stay with their roots and their
    culture and their lives.
        Then we got everything going again. And then when he and I came of
    age in the early eighties and began to assume positions of
    responsibility, we had another horrible structural collapse in the rural
    areas and the small towns along the Mississippi River because
    agriculture and the labor-intensive, low-scale, low-wage industries both
    collapsed at the same time. And our little towns were turned into ghost
    towns. We had whole counties, county after county after county, with 20,
    25 percent unemployment.
        What we found was when we talk about managing the process of change,
    it was like a lot of what Nadine and others have said. Mike, you showed
    us those pictures. You had people who knew they had to change or they
    ought to change, but they had a relatively low skill level. They had
    limits on what kind of opportunities you could immediately put in the
    small towns, what the Mayor talked about, and they had a horrendous
    aversion to moving because their life was more than their livelihood.
    And then it all became complicated by the incredible pressures on family
    life, which led more and more families to disintegrate under the burden.
    And Mike and I literally began our careers dealing with the broken
    pieces of people's lives against that background.
        I say that only to make this point: I cannot repeal the laws of
    change. In every State in every area of this country the average 18-
    year-old will change the nature of work seven or eight times in a
    lifetime now, in a global economy. People who take jobs as bank tellers,
    for example, even if they keep working for the banks, 10 years after
    they started what they do will be different because of technology and
    because of the changes in the economy.
        But what we have to find a way to do is to try to make it possible
    for more people to be faithful to their cultural roots and their way of
    life and to work through this process in a human way. And if you look at
    it, there's a lot of analogy here to all these defense workers that are
    on the food lines in southern California now. I mean, they did what they
    thought they were supposed to do. They won the cold war, and then we
    just cut back on defense spending. There they were in the street; nobody
    had even a theory about how they might go through the kind of process
    Larry described and be given the opportunity to reclaim their own
    destiny.
        I don't pretend that any of this is easy, but I want you to know
    that at least some of us have a feel for what this must be like in those
    little towns. And we'll do what we can.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:57 p.m. at the Oregon Convention Center.
    In his remarks, he referred to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and
    timber business owner Nadine Bailey.