[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.

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    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

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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.