[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 5 (Monday, February 7, 2000)]
[Pages 220-222]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

[[Page 221]]

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 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'' mean 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 Worldwide 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 evermore 
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

[[Page 222]]

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.
    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.