    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 3, 2000]
    [Pages 181-183]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast
    February 3, 2000

        Thank you, and good morning. Senator Mack,
    Senator Lieberman, Mr. Speaker, Congressman Doyle,
    other distinguished head table guests, and the Members of Congress and
    the Cabinet, my fellow Americans, and our visitors who have come from
    all across the world. Let me thank you again for this prayer breakfast
    and for giving Hillary and me the opportunity to come.
        I ask that we remember in our prayers today a people who are
    particularly grieved, the men, women, and children who lost their loved
    ones on Alaska Airlines flight 261.
        And let me say to all of you, I look forward to this day so much
    every year, a little time to get away from public service and politics
    into the realm of the spirit and to accept your prayers. This is a
    special year for me because, like Senator Mack,
    I'm not coming back, at least in my present position. And I have given a
    lot of thought to what I might say today, much of it voiced by my friend
    of 30 years now, Senator Joe Lieberman,
    who did a wonderful job for all of us.
        The question I would hope that all of my fellow citizens would ask
    themselves today is: What responsibilities are now imposed on us because
    we live at perhaps the greatest moment of prosperity and promise in the
    history of our Nation, at a time when the world is growing ever more
    interdependent? What special responsibilities do we have?
        Joe talked about some of them. We--I sometimes think in my wry way,
    when Senator Mack referred to his cousin, Judge Arnold, a longtime friend of Hillary's and mine, as being on his
    far right and that making it uncomfortable, I laughed to myself. That's
    why Connie wanted him on the bench, so he would
    get one more Democrat out of the public debate. [Laughter] But I wonder
    how long we'll be all right after this prayer breakfast. I wonder if
    we'll make it 15 minutes or 30 or an hour. Maybe we'll make it 48 hours
    before we'll just be back to normal.
        So I want to ask you to think about that today: What is underneath
    the fundamental points that Senator Lieberman made today? For us
    Christians, Jesus said, the two most important Commandments of all were
    to love the Lord with all our heart and to love our neighbors as
    ourselves. The Torah says that anyone who turns aside the stranger acts
    as if he turns aside

    [[Page 182]]

    the most high God. The Koran contains its own powerful version of the
    Golden Rule, telling us never to do unto others what we would not like
    done to ourselves.
        So what I would like to ask you in this, my last opportunity to be
    the President at this wonderful prayer breakfast: Who are our neighbors,
    and what does it mean to love them?
        His Holiness John Paul II wrote us a
    letter about how he answered that question, and we are grateful for
    that.
        For me, we must start with the fact that ``neighbors'' means
    something different today in common language than it did when I was a
    boy. It really means something different in common language than it did
    when I became President, when there were 50 websites on the World Wide
    Web. Today, there are over 50 million, in only 7 years. So that we see
    that within our borders we are not only growing more diverse every day
    in terms of race and ethnic groups and religion, but we can talk to
    people all across the world in an instant, in ever more interesting ways
    that go far beyond business and commerce and politics.
        I have a cousin who is from the same little town in Arkansas I am,
    who plays chess a couple of times a week with a man in Australia, 8,000
    miles away. The world is growing smaller and more interdependent. And I
    guess the point I would like to make to you today is, as time and space
    contract, the wisdom of the human heart must expand. We must be able to
    love our neighbors and accept our essential oneness.
        Now, globalization is forcing us to that conclusion, so is science.
    I've had many opportunities to say in the last few months that the most
    enlightening evening I had last year was one that Hillary sponsored at the White House where a
    distinguished scientist and expert in human
    genome research informed us that we are all genetically 99.9 percent the
    same and, furthermore, said that the differences among people in the
    same racial group genetically are different, are greater--the individual
    differences among people in the same racial and ethnic groups are
    greater than the differences from group to group.
        For some that is reassuring; for some that is disturbing. When I
    said that in the State of the Union, the Republicans and Democrats both
    laughed uncomfortably. [Laughter] It seemed inconceivable. But the truth
    is that modern science has taught us what we always learned from ancient
    faiths, the most important fact of life on this Earth is our common
    humanity. Our faith--I love what Representative Doyle said--our faith is
    the conviction of things unseen. But more and more, our faith is
    confirmed by what we know and see.
        So, with all the blessings we now enjoy, what shall we do with it?
    If we say, ``Okay, we accept it, God, even though we don't like it every
    day, we are one with our brothers and sisters, whether we like them or
    not all the time. We have to be bigger. Our hearts have to grow deeper.
    Time and space contract; help us to expand our spirits,'' what does that
    mean?
        We know we can't build our own future without helping others to
    build theirs. But many of us live on the cutting edge of a new economy,
    while over a billion people live on the bare edge of survival. And here
    in our own country, there are still too many poor children and too many
    communities that have not participated in our prosperity.
        The Christian Bible says that Jesus warned us that even as we do it
    unto the least of these, we have done it unto our God. When times are
    tough and all of our fellow citizens are having a hard time pulling
    together, we can be forgiven if we look at the welfare of the whole. Now
    the welfare of the whole is the strongest it has ever been, but people
    within our country and beyond our borders are still in trouble, people
    with good values, people with the values you have held up here today,
    people who would gladly work. We dare not turn away from them if we
    believe in our common humanity.
        We see all over the world the chorus of denial about our common
    responsibility for the welfare of this planet, even though all the
    scientists say that it is changing and warming at an unsustainable rate,
    and all great faiths have reminded us of our solemn obligation to our
    earthly home.
        Even more troubling to me, our dazzling modern world is witness to a
    resurgence of society's oldest demon, the inability to love our closest
    neighbors as ourselves if they look or worship differently from the rest
    of us. Today, the Irish peace process is strained by a lack of trust
    between Republican Catholics and Protestant Unionists. In the Middle
    East, with all its hope, we are still having to work very hard to
    overcome the profoundest of suspicions between Israeli Jews and
    Palestinian and Syrian Arabs.

    [[Page 183]]

        We have people here today from the Indian subcontinent, perhaps the
    most dangerous place in the world today because of the tensions over
    Kashmir and the possession of nuclear weapons. And yet, when people from
    the Indian subcontinent come to America, they do better than nearly
    anybody because of their family values, their work ethics, and their
    remarkable capacity, innate capacity, for absorbing all the lessons of
    modern science and technology.
        In Bosnia and Kosovo, Christians thought they were being patriotic
    to cleanse their lands of Muslims. In other places, Islamic terrorists
    claim their faith commands them to kill infidels, though the Koran
    teaches that God created nations and tribes that we might know one
    another, not that we might despise one another.
        Here at home, we still see Asians, blacks, gays, even in one
    instance last year, children at a Jewish school, subject to attacks just
    because of who they are. And here in Washington, we are not blameless,
    for we often, too, forget in the heat of political battle our common
    humanity. We slip from honest difference, which is healthy, into
    dishonest demonization. We ignore, when we're all hyped and in a fight,
    all those Biblical admonitions we profess to believe: that ``we all see
    through a glass darkly''; that, with Saint Paul, we all do what we would
    not, and we do not do what we would; that ``faith, hope, and charity
    abide, but the greatest of these is charity''; that God says to all of
    us, not just some, ``I have redeemed you. I have called you by your
    name. You are Mine,'' all of you.
        Once Abraham Lincoln responded to some friends of his who were
    complaining really bitterly about politicians who would not support him.
    And he said to them, and I quote, ``You have more of a feeling of
    personal resentment than I have. Perhaps I have too little of it. But I
    never thought it paid.'' Well, we know it doesn't pay. And the truth is,
    we're all here today because, in God's timetable, we're all just like
    Senator Mack and me. We're all term-limited.
        In my lifetime, our Nation has never had the chance we now have to
    build the future of our dreams for our children, to be good neighbors to
    the rest of the world, to live out the admonition of all our faiths. To
    do it, we will have to first conquer our own demons and embrace our
    common humanity with humility and gratitude.
        I leave you with the words of a great prayer by Chief Seattle.
    ``This we know: All things are connected. We did not weave the web of
    life. We are merely a strand in it. And whatever we do to the web, we do
    to ourselves.''
        May God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:05 a.m. in the International Ballroom at
    the Hilton Washington Towers. In his remarks, he referred to Judge
    Richard S. Arnold, U.S. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, Little Rock,
    AR.