[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 6 (Monday, February 15, 1999)]
[Pages 220-224]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the ``AmeriCorps Call to Service'' in College Park, Maryland

February 10, 1999

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, when I was 
listening to Stephen and Leslie and Justin and Pepe talk, I was reminded 
of why I wanted to be President--so that I could give young people like 
them the chance to make America a better place.
    I want to thank all those who are here today who have supported our 
efforts. I thank Harris Wofford for his outstanding leadership of the 
Corporation for National Service; Deb Jospin and John Gomperts of 
AmeriCorps. I thank Governor Glendening and Lieutenant Governor Kathleen 
Kennedy Townsend for making Maryland America's leading State for citizen 
service. They have clearly done that. I thank my good friend, Prince 
George's County Executive Wayne Curry; Senator Mike Miller, my longtime 
friend; and Mayor Jacobs, thank you for making us welcome. Carson Daly, 
thank you for the work MTV did on those wonderful spots, the PSA's. I 
would like to thank also the mother of the Lieutenant Governor, my good 
friend, Ethel Kennedy, for being here today. And I thank Mark Gearan, 
our Peace Corps Director, and I'll say a little more about the Peace 
Corps in a minute and its relationship to AmeriCorps.
    I'd like to thank one person who is not here today, but who was on 
the frontlines of creating AmeriCorps, Senator Barbara Mikulski, your 
United States Senator from Maryland. I thank her. I want to thank the 
president of the University of Maryland, on my right, and the president 
of the student government of the University of Maryland, on my left, for 
making me welcome. Avery and Dr. Mote, thank you.
    You have already heard from Dr. Mote and others that 6 years ago I 
came here to celebrate the end of the Summer of Service, which was our 
dry run for this national service program. We wanted to work out the

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kinks and see whether we could make this idea go. There were three 
people who are here who were instrumental on that day; I would like to 
thank them: Georgia Sorensen, Marilyn Smith, and my former White House 
staffer, who I miss very much, Bill Galston. Thank you all very much for 
what you have done.
    And I thank the University of Maryland for the College Park 
Scholars, the Team Maryland athletes, the work-study students that are 
tutoring, and the others from the students and faculty who demonstrate 
the power of citizen service.
    Let me say to all of you, when I ran for President in 1992 I wanted 
to get America working again and moving again, but I also wanted to 
bring America together again. It seemed to me that we had two great 
problems. One is that our economy was not functioning very well, and we 
seemed to be getting weaker, but also that we seemed to be letting our 
divisions overcome what we have in common.
    Martin Luther King once said that the old law of an eye for an eye 
sooner or later leaves everyone blind. I always believed that America's 
differences could be the source of our strength if we respected and we 
celebrated our differences but we understood that, underneath it all, 
there was something that bound us together that was more important.
    So, as I look back on the last 6 years, I think we can all take a 
great deal of pride in what our country has achieved together: 
economically, the longest peacetime expansion in history; the lowest 
peacetime unemployment rate since 1957, 42 years ago; the welfare rolls 
cut nearly in half; the lowest crime rate in over a quarter century. I 
think those are great things.
    But I think we can also celebrate the evidence that we are coming 
together: over 90 percent of our children across all racial and ethnic 
lines immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in 
history; the doors of college literally open to all with the HOPE 
scholarship; the lifetime learning tax credit; the more generous Pell 
grant, more affordable student loans; more work-study slots. Those 
things matter. But maybe most of all, those of you here in AmeriCorps, 
and those in citizen service--whether in the Peace Corps, serving our 
country in the military, or serving in some other way--embody the 
determination of America to draw closer together as we grow more 
diverse. And that, I think, is terribly important.
    When you saw the four AmeriCorps volunteers up here speaking, and 
each of you identifying with them in turn--if they worked in your 
project or you knew them--you know they were a picture of America, of 
the changing face of America, and the best of America that never 
changes.
    If you look around the world today, at many of the challenges that I 
face as your President and that the United States faces--the sad trip 
that the First Lady and I recently took to Jordan for the funeral of our 
friend the King of Jordan, who survived decades of assassination 
attempts--literally decades of assassination attempts, probably 50 in 
all--to stand as a symbol of peace among people in a very tough 
neighborhood, who use religion as a reason to find their differences 
more important than their common humanity. All over the world today, you 
see that. If the United States wants to lead the world toward peace and 
freedom and prosperity in a new century in a new millennium, it is 
actually quite an advantage for us to have within our borders people 
from all races, all religions, all ethnic groups, all cultural 
backgrounds doing all kinds of different things.
    But we cannot do good around the world unless we are good at home. 
And therefore, we have to find this magical balance, being honest about 
our differences of opinion on matters from the serious to the mundane, 
and I'll leave it to you to decide whether it was serious or mundane 
when the president asked me take sides in the basketball game. 
[Laughter] You've got a great team here, though, I'll tell you that. 
I've watched it. We have to find a way to do that, to say, this is what 
I believe; this is where I stand; this is what I'm for; and also to say 
how lucky we are to stand on the verge of the new millennium in a 
totally global society, where people are being brought closer together 
than ever before, and we are finding ways to relish, to celebrate, to 
honor our differences in a way to bring us closer together instead of 
driving us apart.

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    AmeriCorps is the living, breathing symbol of the answer to that. 
Where we do not ask people to check their differences at the door, but 
we do ask them to reaffirm our common humanity. We do not ask for a 
handout, but we do ask for a hand up for everyone who needs it, and we 
say we are going forward together. That is what you represent. That is 
my fondest hope for America. And I thank you for your service.
    You know, all during the 20th century, the tradition of citizen 
service grew stronger in America. In the Great Depression--I remember my 
parents telling me about the chance President Roosevelt gave able-
bodied, unemployed people to work in Civilian Conservation Corps, the 
CCC. They cleared trails; they fought fires; they planted trees. They 
built whole State parks: the Appalachian Trail, Skyline Drive in 
Virginia; parks in my home State that Hillary and I have stayed in, with 
rather interesting names like Petit Jean and Devil's Den. I have in the 
back office of the White House an old CCC cap, a cap that one of the 
volunteers wore in the thirties, that I found wedged in between a 
chimney and a wall, in a cabin in a State park in the mountains of north 
Arkansas. And I have kept it with me all these long years, to remember 
the unifying power of citizen service in one of the most difficult 
moments of the 20th century for the United States.
    President Kennedy, in the 1960's, asked young people to serve in the 
Peace Corps to teach English, to provide health care, to bring running 
water and electricity to some of the most remote villages in Africa, 
Asia, and South America. My brother-in-law served in the Peace Corps in 
Colombia. And the other night, he was getting together with some of the 
people who served there with him. When we were getting ready to come out 
here today and Senator Wofford came in with Mark Gearan, the present 
Peace Corps Director, we were celebrating the fact that, if our new 
budget passes, we will have more people serving in the Peace Corps in 
the next 2 years than have ever served in any given year. We'll be back 
at an all-time high.
    And we were lamenting the fact that we just had to withdraw our 
Peace Corps volunteers from Eritrea and Ethiopia, two countries that I 
have felt particularly close to in the last couple of years, because of 
the trouble the two countries are having, the threat to go to war. And 
the Peace Corps volunteers, going all the way back for decades, have 
volunteered to try to come in and solve the conflict and deal with the 
disputed area of land. I don't know if they will accept it but think of 
that. All these years later, people that were there years and years and 
years ago remember what it was like, not to give a handout but to give a 
hand up and to ask people to understand that their differences are not 
as important as what they have in common.
    So I thank our Peace Corps volunteers; I thank Mark Gearan; and I 
thank all of you in AmeriCorps, because you are in the rich tradition of 
America's citizen service, from the CCC to the Peace Corps to 
AmeriCorps.
    Now, six summers after I first came here, AmeriCorps is thriving. 
There now have been over 100,000 people serve in AmeriCorps in just 4 
years of the full-time program. Everywhere I go around the country, I 
see you. I see you in all kinds of different contexts. I was in San Jose 
right before the election, and there were a lot of--the Peace Corps 
volunteers had just come to start their mission, and so I saw them 
standing on the street as I pulled into the hotel. And I asked them all 
to come see me, and we took a little picture, and they were from 
everywhere.
    And then when I went home to Arkansas after the terrible tornadoes a 
couple of weeks ago, in both the communities I visited there were 
AmeriCorps volunteers there, and there were people there who, believe 
me, would never have come to Arkansas in their lives--[laughter]--if 
they hadn't been in Ameri-
Corps. I know it was good for the people they were helping, and I think 
it was pretty good for them.
    This has been an astonishing encounter for tens of thousands of 
people. Now, all of you know what it's like. I love talking to people 
who have been in AmeriCorps because I always hear two things. Number 
one, they're proud of what they did to help people, teaching a child to 
read or immunizing a child or having a playground that's safe in an area

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that used to be dominated by gangs or cleaning up some polluted site or 
doing something to preserve the environment. I love that. The second 
thing I always hear is, ``I like the people with whom I serve. I met 
people I never would have met. I got to know people I never would have 
gotten to know. We were all so different, and yet, when we worked 
together, we grew together, and it made my life different and better.'' 
That is what AmeriCorps needs to do, and that is what America needs to 
do.
    America needs to think of itself as sort of a giant AmeriCorps, the 
Peace Corps at home, getting things done together. Getting things done 
together. If our budget passes this fall, we can boost the number of 
AmeriCorps volunteers by one quarter, to 50,000 members. In our new 
budget, we want to keep expanding AmeriCorps every year so that by the 
year 2003, and there forward, every year, 100,000 young people will be 
serving in AmeriCorps.
    But I want to challenge the young people of this country, and the 
not so young who are willing to do it, to sign up for AmeriCorps, to see 
for yourselves what you can do to solve America's problems and reap 
America's promise. I want to challenge high school students, as well. 
Maryland has done a wonderful job, as the Governor and the Lieutenant 
Governor said, being the only State in the country to actually require 
community service as a part of a public education. In our balanced 
budget, we propose to allow high-schoolers for the very first time to 
join AmeriCorps by serving part-time during the school year and full-
time in the summers. And I want to challenge, again, the young people 
beyond this room, to dedicate a year or two of your lives to a cause 
larger than yourselves. It may be your best chance to change the lives 
of others for the better and to enrich your own life in the process.
    Today, so many young people have the time and freedom and energy 
they will never have in the future, to tackle the kind of challenge 
AmeriCorps represents, to pack a bag at a moment's notice, to fight a 
forest fire or move into our most remote towns or Native American 
reservations to teach children or work with churches in some of our 
toughest neighborhoods. At the end of your service, as all of you know, 
AmeriCorps will provide help to pay for college or pay off student 
loans. So I ask you all to help me reach others, to take advantage of 
this opportunity, to use this moment to prove that this generation of 
young people, far from being a generation of cynics and slackers, is 
instead a generation of doers and patriots.
    Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend quoted something her 
father said. I would like to close with a quotation from Senator Robert 
Kennedy, in a speech he gave to college students in South Africa when I 
was a young man. It resonated around the world, and every person my age, 
which was then your age now--every young person I knew, without regard 
to their party or their opinions or anything else, was riveted by the 
notion that a United States Senator could go to South Africa and talk to 
the young people about building a different future, a long time before, 
for the first time in over 300 years, all South Africans had a chance to 
choose their future.
    This is what he said: ``Each time a man stands up for an ideal or 
acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he 
sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a 
million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a 
current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and 
resistance.''
    That is still true today. For those in AmeriCorps, I thank you for 
sending forth those ripples of hope. I thank you for bringing out the 
best in yourselves and others.
    For those who could still yet serve, I ask you to join the rest of 
your fellow citizens in building that bridge to the 21st century that 
all can walk across, arm-in-arm, to the best days of America.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:34 p.m. in Richie Coliseum at the 
University of Maryland. In his remarks, he referred to AmeriCorps 
volunteers Stephen Hellinger, Leslie Mayo, Justin Ward, and Susan (Pepe) 
Carrasco; Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy 
Townsend of Maryland; Thomas V. (Mike) Miller, Jr., president, Maryland 
State Senate; Mayor Michael J. Jacobs of College Park; Carson Daly, 
host, MTV

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Live; and Avery Straw, student government president, and C.D. Mote, Jr., 
president, University of Maryland, College Park.