    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [November 21, 1993]
    [Pages 2043-2045]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Our Lady Help of Christians School in Los Angeles
    November 21, 1993

        Thank you so much. It's wonderful to see all of you here today. I
    want to thank everyone who has made my visit here so wonderful so far,
    especially all the people in the courtyard behind us who took me through
    ``Christmas in other Lands,'' gave me something to eat from every land
    represented. I thank you, Cardinal Mahony, for being here. I thank you,
    Father Santillan, for the wonderful work that you and others do at this
    parish and at this wonderful school. I thank you, Gloria Molina, for
    being my friend and the national cochair of my campaign last year. And I
    want to thank all the members of the various elected groups who are here
    today, the State officials, the local officials who care about you and
    your future, for joining me here today.
        There are three people I want to mention who aren't here today
    because they're back in Washington, and I hope the Cardinal will forgive
    them, but the Congress is actually meeting on Sunday, only because
    they're trying to be home for Thanksgiving. But the Members of Congress
    from this area, Xavier Becerra, Lucille Roybal-Allard, and Esteban
    Torres, all asked me to give you their love and best wishes. I thank
    them for their support of our administration and for their support of
    you.
        I started out this morning in Pasadena meeting with about two dozen
    people who lost their homes or whose family members lost their homes in
    the fire. And I got this interesting little button--I don't know if you
    can see it--it looks almost like a stone pin from where you are, but
    it's actually just a button that was burned up in the fire. And a man
    who saved two other homes but who lost his own, found 50 of these pins.
    And he and his wife had them on. And from a distance I said, where did
    you get those pins? And he told me what they were, and he gave me one.
    This is just a charred reminder of the courage and the heroism of the
    people of this area who struggled through those terrible fires. I thank
    them for what they did, and I hope that their decency and courage in an
    emergency will inspire all the rest of us to do better everyday of our
    lives. I wish all of you could have been there with me at the
    Presbyterian church in Pasadena today to see them.

    [[Page 2044]]

        I wanted to come here today because I came here to this community
    during my campaign for President. I walked the streets of this
    community. I talked to children and adults. I talked to working people.
    I talked to people who didn't have work but wanted it. I talked to
    people who are worried about the violence and the crime, about the
    pressures on the families and the dangers to the children. And I want
    you to know that every night when I go to bed in the White House I think
    of the children of this country, of their future, of the dangers and the
    problems, of the hopes and the dreams.
        We are working now in Washington to pass a bill which will make a
    big step toward making our streets safer, something that Mayor Riordan
    ran on when he ran for mayor. If the bill passes, the crime bill, which
    has now passed both Houses of the Congress, we may be able to give our
    cities and this country up to 100,000 more law enforcement officers to
    protect people, to keep crime from occurring in the first place.
        Thanks to your Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate passed a bill
    which will ban assault weapons and which bill ban the possession of
    handguns by young people. And both Houses have passed a version of what
    we call the Brady bill, which would make people wait 5 days before they
    get a handgun so we can check their criminal background, their age,
    their mental health history.
        All these things will help. All these things will help, but in the
    end, my fellow Americans, we have to take our communities back community
    by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, family by
    family, child by child.
        Our disregard for life in this country is seen coast to coast. This
    morning I got up and read the Los Angeles Times and saw that a 2-year-
    old child was killed last night because her mother took her on an
    expedition in which the gang her mother was associated with got in a
    fight with another gang, and random shooting into their car felled no
    adult, just a 2-year-old innocent child. In Pasadena, which used to have
    a very different sort of image, they are gripped, haunted by the thought
    that three children were killed on Halloween--teenagers. Across the
    country in Baltimore, the Mayor of Baltimore told me a heart-rending
    story of going to the home of an 18-year-old child who made it his
    practice every Halloween to take little children out so that they could
    go trick-or-treating safely. And they were walking down a street, and
    across the street a 14-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy were standing.
    And the 14-year-old had a gun and dared the 13-year-old to shoot across
    the street. And so he did and killed an older child whose only offense
    was that he wanted little children to be able to go out and trick-or-
    treat safely on Halloween.
        What we want America to look like is what we see here today: the
    faces of these children safe and secure, learning and whole, looking
    toward the future, believing in their lives, living by their values.
    That's what we want America to look like.
        And so I tell you, we are doing everything we can to try to give you
    the tools you need to make your community safer. But we have to make up
    our mind that we will no longer tolerate children killing children,
    children having guns and being better armed than police officers,
    neighborhoods unsafe. We can do better. And we're going to have to do it
    for all of our people without regard to race or income or region. You
    deserve as much, and we have to do it.
        Father Santillan mentioned Cesar Chavez. Think how horrified he
    would be, God rest his soul, if he were still here today to pick up the
    paper and read about the 2-year-old child being killed. He was a devotee
    of nonviolence and self-sacrifice, not violence and self-indulgence.
        Tomorrow we celebrate with regret the 30th anniversary of the
    assassination of our Nation's only Roman Catholic President, John
    Kennedy. Think how he would feel, after having spent his time as
    President reaching out to Latin America in the Alliance for Progress,
    reaching here at home to get our young people into the Peace Corps,
    trying to help improve opportunities for Americans, to think of all the
    horrible things that are happening to our young people in this country.
        Think of how Robert Kennedy, who flew to California and helped
    Chavez break a 26-day fast, would feel here today. Hands bleeding from
    the clutches of an adoring mob at the end of this fast, Robert Kennedy
    said this to the farm workers those long years ago: ``When your children
    and grandchildren take their place in America, going to high school and
    college and taking good jobs at good pay, when you look at them you will
    say''--he said to the farm workers--`` `I did this. I was there at the
    point

    [[Page 2045]]

    of difficulty and danger.' And though you may be old and bent with
    labor, no man will stand taller than you when you say, `I marched with
    Cesar.' '' They marched so that these children could have opportunity,
    not danger. And we have to give it to them.
        But let me also say to you, my fellow Americans, I am well aware
    that we cannot repair the troubled wounds of this country simply by
    making ourselves safer on our streets. We must also give our young
    people more to say yes to. I have worked as hard as I could to turn this
    economy around, to bring jobs to this country, to bring jobs to this
    troubled part of our Nation. Southern California now has a higher
    unemployment rate than any other State. We have got to do better. I know
    and you know that not only faith and family but work, work is required
    to organize society, to keep it safe and whole and strong and marching
    forward.
        And so we have made a good beginning. In 10 months more new jobs
    have come into the private sector than in the previous 4 years but
    nowhere near enough to put all the people of east Los Angeles to work
    who want their jobs. We must do better, and we will.
        I fought hard and without apology for the North American Free Trade
    Agreement because I know Mexico is our partner in the future, whether
    anyone likes it or not, and we have to grow together in strength
    together. And because I know that no wealthy country on the face of this
    Earth can create more jobs for its people or higher incomes for people
    who work harder and smarter unless there are more customers for the
    products and services the people produce, we have to have those
    customers. We will find some of them in Mexico and in Chile and in
    Venezuela and in Colombia and in Argentina and all over Latin America,
    because we are reaching out to our friends south of our borders again
    for a great new partnership, for opportunity there and opportunity here
    in east Los Angeles. It is important.
        And you may have seen that I had the leaders of 14 Asian-Pacific
    nations together in Washington State for the last 2 days. One of them,
    the President of the Philippines, came to Los Angeles today to go to
    church with Filipino-Americans in this county. We know that that is the
    fastest growing part of the world, and they, too, will be our partners
    in providing jobs for our people. But in the end, we must take care of
    our own better.
        The reason so many working people, the reason so many Hispanic-
    Americans oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement is that they
    had seen too many times when the working people of this country worked
    harder and harder for less and less security. And so I say to you, we
    have to have good, decent education not just for these children but for
    adults throughout their lives so they can always get new jobs. We have
    to have health care not just for those who can afford it or who are
    lucky enough to have jobs where it's covered but health care that can
    never be taken away. Every other advanced country has it. And we must
    have it here, too.
        And we have to have an investment strategy that will help our people
    everywhere, everywhere, to find the jobs that they deserve. Since I
    became President, the Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who is here with
    me today, has made over a dozen trips to California. I have been here
    seven times. We are working hard to turn this economy around, not
    because of some abstract unemployment number but because the faces in
    this crowd are willing to make America a model of what every society in
    the world ought to be in the 21st century, where diversity is strength,
    where diversity is richness and laughter and fullness and hope. Because
    everybody who works hard, everybody who learns well, everyone who lives
    by the values that are cherished in this parish has a chance to be
    rewarded. That, I believe, is God's will for all of us on this Earth,
    and we must work for it.
        Thank you all, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:38 p.m. on the school playground. In his
    remarks, he referred to Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los
    Angeles; Father Juan Santillan, parish priest; and Gloria Molina, Los
    Angeles County commissioner.