    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [December 4, 1993]
    [Pages 2123-2127]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Creative Artists Agency Reception in Beverly Hills,
    California
    December 4, 1993

        I want to thank you, Michael, for that wonderful introduction. Even
    more I want to thank you and Judy for meeting me at the door with your
    three children, which reminded me what my job is all about. Are they
    great looking kids or what? [Applause] I want to thank you and Bill and
    Ron for hosting us all here. It's good to be back in this gorgeous
    building. And I'm delighted to be here with my good friend David Wilhelm
    and Secretary Ron Brown, who has been to California more than a dozen
    times in this first year of our administration trying to put together an
    approach that will help our Government to help you recover economically.
    I thank Kathleen Brown and Gray Davis and especially my good friend
    Senator Dianne Feinstein for being here with us. I hope you will send
    her back to the Senate. I also want to say a special word of thanks to
    so many of you in this audience who worked for me in the last election,
    who made appearances for me, who helped to raise funds and helped to
    make arguments and who stood up for me in the face of some pretty
    wilting criticism.
        I appreciated what Michael said about the fullback Presidency. One
    of my predecessors, Woodrow Wilson, who interestingly enough I learned
    had the biggest feet of any President until I came along--[laughter]--
    Woodrow Wilson was a great scholar, and he wrote a book, a much
    criticized book, about George Washington. But he said that the most
    important thing about George Washington when this country was getting
    off the ground was he never knew when he had been defeated in battle. He
    did not have enough sense to know when he was beat, so he just kept on
    going.
        Well, there's something to be said for that. We measure out our
    lives too many times in short durations. And we measure defeat in the
    moment instead of over the long run. I did not run for this office for
    so long and under such difficult circumstances either to squander the
    opportunity to change this country by not trying to or by giving up in
    the face of opposition or even my own mistakes. For it is clearly true
    that in a time of great change with unprecedented challenges, if you try
    to do a lot of things, every now and then you won't do the right thing.
    But I think if your ears and eyes are open and your heart's in the right
    place, better to make a mistake and correct it than to sit on the
    sidelines and not try to change the country.
        I came to California today to meet for a period of what turned out
    to be about 3\1/2\ hours, which is why we're a little late tonight, with
    a lot of community leaders from all walks of life to talk about what we
    had done together in the last year and what we could do in the year
    ahead to help to rebuild this economy and to rebuild hope and
    opportunity and community here. And afterward I went into the plant
    where we were at Rockwell and talked to a lot of folks who were working
    in the plant and gave an account of this last year. I don't want to do
    that tonight except to say that when I was upstairs meeting some of you,
    it was interesting to me what was mentioned going through the line. Some
    people said, ``I'm really glad you fought so hard for NAFTA and passed
    it.'' Others said, ``I'm glad you're trying to get a new

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    world trade agreement through GATT, but I'm glad you're fighting for the
    interest of the entertainment industry while you're doing it.'' Many
    said, ``Thank you for the Brady bill.'' And some talked about the speech
    and encounter that I experienced on World AIDS Day.
        But everybody who talked to me at least had a sense of possibility,
    a possibility of change, a possibility of improvement, a possibility
    that we were really doing things again. I ran for President because I
    thought this country had two great problems. I thought we were going in
    the wrong direction economically and otherwise, and I thought we were
    coming apart when we ought to be coming together. I ran because I wanted
    this country to go into the 21st century still the greatest country in
    human history and because I want every person who lives in this country
    to have a chance to live up to their God-given potential, something most
    of us in this room have had to such an extreme degree that we almost
    take it for granted that it's there for everyone.
        And in the last year we have made a good beginning. Michael was kind
    enough to read the list of most of the important initiatives. This
    economic program to bring the deficit down and keep interest rates down
    and inflation down is very important. We've had a 14-year high in home
    sales. We've got the unemployment rate going down. We've got more
    private sector jobs in 10 months than in the previous 4 years. We are
    moving in the right direction even though, to be candid, most Americans
    haven't felt it yet, especially here in California. Plainly the
    direction is the right one.
        We've tried to help families put their lives together and help
    people who are working and who have children succeed as parents and as
    workers, one of the biggest challenges in America today, one we all
    face, many of us. But since most parents have to work and most workers
    are parents, we can't go where we need to go unless we are committed to
    the proposition that people ought to be able to succeed in both roles.
    That's why the family leave law was so important.
        Perhaps the most moving experience I've had inside the White House
    occurred a couple of Sundays ago, maybe about six now or eight. I came
    in from my morning run, and there was a family there, a father, a
    mother, three children. And I noticed the middle child was in the
    wheelchair. And I went over and shook hands with them. It's very unusual
    for people to be touring the White House on Sunday morning, but this
    little girl was part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. And she was
    desperately ill, and she wanted to see the White House and meet the
    President, so they brought her in there. And I shook hands with them,
    and I was a little embarrassed to be in my jogging outfit so I went up
    and got cleaned up, and I came down looking like a real President--
    [laughter]--and stood there to shake hands with the family and to take a
    picture. So we took a proper picture. And I was walking off, and the
    father grabbed me by the arm really strong. And I turned around, and he
    said, ``Just in case you think what you do doesn't matter around here,''
    he said, ``my little girl is probably not going to make it. But I have
    been able to take time off from my job to spend time with her. It's the
    most important time I've ever spent in my life, especially if she
    doesn't make it. And because of that family leave bill, I could take
    that time off without fear of losing my job and hurting my wife and my
    other two children. Nobody should ever have to make that decision, and
    now we don't. Don't you ever think what you do here does not have an
    impact on people where they live.''
        I say that to make this point: In the end, the true test of our
    endeavors is whether they enrich the meaning of the lives of the people
    who live in this country. In the end, all the statistics and numbers and
    did you pass more bills than anybody else and all that sort of stuff--
    really matters that were they the right bills, and did they affect
    people, and are they moving people both forward and together.
        And I came here tonight really to ask for your help for this reason:
    I believe that we can move this economy in the right direction, even
    though the decisions are unbelievably difficult when you're trying to
    reduce the deficit and increase investment where you need to increase it
    at the same time. I believe we can get a good set of trade agreements to
    expand global trade. I believe we can have a good technology policy. I
    believe we can redo the unemployment system and have a good training
    system in this country again. I believe, in short, that we can make the
    kinds of changes, public changes we need to make to move this country
    forward.
        But we have to face the fact that millions and millions and millions
    of our fellow Americans are caught not only in an economic under

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    class but almost in an outer class totally apart from the life that the
    rest of us take for granted. And it is because they are the ones who
    have been hardest hit by the combined force of a loss of economic
    opportunity, the destruction of community support, and the erosion of
    family itself. And the vacuum that is created has been filled for all
    too many of them by organized violence, organized around guns and gangs
    and drugs, with no offsetting forces.
        And as Michael implied, some of that has been aggravated by the fact
    that there are not sustaining forces in our culture which tend to offset
    that. As I told the ministers in Memphis a few weeks ago at the Church
    of God in Christ convention, when they invited me into the pulpit where
    Martin Luther King gave his last sermon, there are problems this Nation
    has that cannot be fixed by the passage of a law or by an official
    decree from the President of the United States. They require us to
    change from the inside out and to change family by family, community by
    community.
        I have a good friend with whom I grew up at home who wrote me of a
    conversation she had with some other people who were bemoaning the fate
    of all these kids in trouble, and this person said, ``Well, how in the
    world are we going to save these kids?'' And my friend said, ``We're
    going to save them the same way we lost them, one at a time.'' If you
    think of that, society is largely organized around work and family. We
    have too many people today living in this world without either. And
    nature--and to be sure, they represent nature--abhors a vacuum. And that
    vacuum is being filled by all kinds of forces which are fundamentally
    destructive of those people ever becoming what they ought to be.
        Now, we are trying to deal with that as much as we can through
    public policy, through the Brady bill and through Senator Feinstein's
    effort to ban assault weapons and through--[applause]--that's worth an
    applause--I met your distinguished police chief for the first time
    tonight, even though I've been bragging on him for years now--through
    the effort to provide another 100,000 police officers in properly
    trained, properly deployed in community policing settings throughout the
    country, because that will actually diminish crime and provide
    alternative role models for young people.
        There are a lot of other things we are trying to do. But I am
    telling you, the fact is it is awfully hard to put lives back together
    in an environment in which there are no lives organized fundamentally by
    work, by family, and by other community organizations that shape values
    and behavior; when impulses govern the lives of young people who cannot
    even fully understand the implications of what it means, often, to pick
    up a gun and pull the trigger; and when madly we permit many of these
    children, who themselves were never even given the fundamental basics of
    self-esteem and self-control and respect for others, weapons that make
    them better armed than the police who are supposed to be patrolling
    their streets.
        But the fundamental problem is what has happened to all of them
    inside and what does not happen to them day by day. One hundred and
    sixty thousand kids in this country stay home from school every day
    because they are afraid of being shot or knifed on the way to school or
    in the schoolhouse.
        Now, what's all that got to do with you? First of all, you have the
    capacity to do good, culturally, to help to change the way we behave,
    the way we think of ourselves. You have clearly, many of you, reinforced
    the awareness of our obligations to our environment, and we have begun
    to change in fundamental ways. Look at the way we changed our ideas
    about smoking in recent years, culturally, not because laws made us do
    it but because as a people we just decided to move in a different
    direction. You've helped to battle world hunger and make people more
    realistic as well as caring about AIDS, and you've promoted world peace.
    And through the people at MTV and others who have promoted the motor
    voter bill, you've really advanced the civil rights cause by opening up
    a franchise to young people and to many who would otherwise not have
    registered and voted.
        Now what we have are people who are vulnerable to cultural forces
    that the rest of us find entertaining, that are not in and of themselves
    bad when made part of a culture that is organized by work, by family,
    and by other institutions. I love television. I saw two or three of you
    tonight and quoted about some time I'd seen you on television recently.
    I love that. I am a movie-goer almost to the point of compulsion, have
    been since I was a small boy.
        But you think of it, all of us who love that. How is our life
    organized? We spend most of our time working. We spend a lot of our free
    time, most of us, with our families. We have

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    other ties to a community which shape our values, our conduct, our
    priorities, what we do with our money, how we think about our
    obligations. But what might be entertaining to us--a violent, thrilling
    movie or television program, a torrid but fundamentally amoral use and
    manipulation of people in what may be for us just an entertaining 30
    minutes or an hour--if it's 10 or 11 hours a day of relentless exposure
    into the minds of people who have never been taught to understand the
    consequences of their action, never had any kind of internal structure
    motivated and driven by seeing their parents go to work every day and
    having a regular relationship with family and having other institutions,
    then these things can unintentionally set forth a chain reaction of even
    more impulsive behavior, even more inability to deal with conflict in
    nonviolent ways and to pass up the aggressive influences and impulses
    that all of us feel but most of us learn at some point in our lives not
    to act on. And it all gets worse if the void left by the loss of family
    and work and other institutions is filled by gangs and guns and drugs.
        So, what I ask you for tonight is not to wear a hair shirt and say,
    ``Mea culpa, I wish I hadn't done this, that, or the other thing,'' but
    to recognize that what may be one person's moment of entertainment, even
    exhilaration, the taking your mind off the pressures of the day, can,
    when multiplied by 1,000, have a cumulative impact that at the very
    least does not help to bring a whole generation of people back from the
    brink. I'm telling you, if we don't find a way to deal with this, the
    rest of these endeavors ultimately will fail. We will not be able to
    make a strength out of our diversity. We will not be able to restore the
    ladder from poverty to the middle class that can be climbed through work
    and education. We will not be able to put our people back together again
    and use our money on education and opportunity instead of crime and
    jail.
        So what I ask you to do is to join a partnership with me, not to
    stop entertaining or even titillating, not to stop frightening or
    thrilling the American public, but to examine what together you might do
    to simply face the reality that so many of our young people live with
    and help us as we seek to rebuild the frayed bonds of this community, as
    we seek to give children nonviolent ways to resolve their own
    frustrations, as we seek to restore some structure and some hope and
    some essential dignity and purpose to lives that have been dominated by
    chaos or worse.
        We must do this. Make no mistake about it. No society, no society
    can prosper allowing huge pockets of people to go on forever without the
    opportunity to work, allowing huge pockets of children to go on without
    the opportunity to get a decent education, allowing huge sections of
    cities to be no man's lands, where the law of the automatic assault
    weapon controls. We cannot do well if we permit that to happen. We need
    every last dollar we can to invest in growth and opportunity and
    positive good things. And we have to use every means at our command.
        There are few things more powerful in any time and place than
    culture. The ability of culture to elevate or debase is profound. You
    know it, and you sense it in the power you have when you do something
    you're really proud of. Does that mean we should never have any violent
    movies? Of course not. I think, to mention one, ``Boyz N the Hood'' was
    a great movie because it showed the truth about what happens when chaos
    is replaced with destruction. I know the young man who made the movie is
    here tonight. But I ask you to think about this. We have got to do this
    for our country. Together, so many of you have more influence over
    different kinds of people that you will never meet, that you're not
    aware of, than a President's speech can bring to bear.
        For 30 years the American family has been under assault. The assault
    attacked black families first because they were most vulnerable
    economically. The same thing is now happening to other families. More
    and more children are born out of wedlock; more and more children are
    being born without parents; more and more children being abandoned; more
    and more kids growing up in violent neighborhoods. The racial
    differences were largely determined by who got hit first because of
    economic vulnerability. But now it is happening to everybody. So 30
    years of family assault, 20 years where most working people had stagnant
    wages, 20 years of developing huge pockets where no one had a job--there
    have always been poor people in this country, but most of them have
    always been able to work--12 years in which we exploded public debt by
    consuming in the present instead of investing more in the future, these
    things happened over a long period of time.

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        Meanwhile, we want more and more entertainment, more and more
    instantaneously, as Michael said. We want more and more news, more and
    more instantaneously. Just give us the thing and let us focus on
    something else. For all of us who have highly structured, successful
    lives where our attention is diverted to the big fundamental things in
    our life, this works fine. For people living in chaos, it is a disaster.
        And so I ask you, while you entertain the rest of us, let us
    together do something to rebuild the bonds of community, to restore the
    spirit of these children, to give people a chance to build whole lives
    around solid values so that they, too, will have internal structures
    that will permit them the luxury of the diversion some of us call
    entertainment.
        We must rebuild this country fundamentally. And we have to have the
    support of people who can shape our culture to do it. It is our job, and
    if we do it, we will be proud we did.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 6:48 p.m. at the Creative Artists Agency
    (CAA). In his remarks, he referred to CAA chairman Michael Ovitz and his
    wife, Judy; Bill Haber and Ron Meyer, CAA partners; David Wilhelm,
    chairman, Democratic National Committee; Kathleen Brown, California
    State treasurer; and Gray Davis, California State comptroller.