Reminder

I'm putting this here after listening to Sarah Vowell's "Partly Cloudly Patriot" essay on Clinton's Presidential Library. I thought of this speech and felt like I wanted to have its text. Yes, it's online in many places, but I feel better knowing it's here. Maybe I'll try to express just how much these words meant to me. But for now, if you find this, think about what it means to look up to thought, complexity, and hope.

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Clinton's Yale Speech about the Shadow Side of Globalization

October 6, 2001

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.
 
Mr. President, thank you for that wonderful introduction. And thank you for coming out in such large numbers today at such an important time for Yale and the United States. I would like to thank the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano, for being here, and my great friend and former colleague, your Member of Congress, Rosa DeLauro. Thank you, Rosa, for being here. I have two other friends, who like me are no longer in public office, but each in their own way, they made a great difference to what we were able to do. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore. My great partner, Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico. And thank you for being here.
 
I also have seen already today a lot of people who are members of our administration. There are five or six of them out there, and so I appreciate Yale giving us a pretext for holding a Clinton alumni meeting here today.
 
I was privileged to study here for exactly one percent of Yale's three hundred years. I love the law school. I love my professors, and have stayed in touch with many of them over all of these long years. One of them I was able to put on the Court of Appeals. One of them I tried to torment in class with disagreements and he lived to torment me ­ my constitutional law professor, Robert Bork. And we had a great set of debates 30 years ago. Now that I replay them in my mind, they seem fresh today.
 
I was fortunate enough to be here at Yale law school with a phenomenal number of outstanding men and women who were my fellow students. One of them did become the United States senator from New York . Senator Schumer went to Harvard.
 
Meeting Hillary was the best thing that happened to me at Yale, and maybe the only thing that really stuck over all of these 30 years. I understand there was some discussion here in the Yale community about whether this Tercentennial should go forward in the aftermath of the awful events of September the 11th. I thank you for going forward. It is what President Bush asked us to do when he asked to us get on with our lives, and it is particularly important at this time.
 
Marking three hundred years of learning at any time would be a significant event. But marking it at this time, with a commitment to be a truly global university, is obviously profoundly important. For three hundred years, beginning three quarters of a century before the Declaration of Independence, Yale has taught young people the wisdom of the past, the analysis of the present and the importance of looking to the future. Yale has asked hard questions and looked for honest answers. That is what I found here 30 years ago, and that is what I see when I look out on this vast array of faces today.
 
America is full of hard questions now. I have spent a great deal of the last three weeks in Manhattan, visiting the crisis center, visiting ground zero, visiting fire stations and police headquarters, going to three schools ­ two of them double schools because the children were blown out of their schools by the events of September the 11th. And I have found so many questions. Hillary and I went to an elementary school in lower Manhattan, where nine and ten-year old students asked me these questions: "Why do they hate us so much anyway?" "How did that guy get all those people to commit suicide?" I never thought I would hear a nine year old ask a question like that.
 
The other day, I had a conversation with Mack McLarty, who was my first chief of staff and my oldest friend. We go back to the time when we were three and four years old. We were talking about the events of September the 11th. We had a conversation I had bet that thousands and thousands of Americans our age have had in the last three weeks. I said, "Mack, if we had been on that plane over Pennsylvania, do you think we would have had the guts to take it down?" He said, "I think so, and I hope so."
 
I have gotten calls from women friends of Hillary's and mine, who are the mothers of young children, from all over America with a simple question: "Bill, is it going to be all right? Tell me it's going to be all right."
 
Well, first of all, it's going to be all right. I can tell you that.
 
Terrorism ­ the killing of innocent people for political or religious or economic reasons ­ is as old as organized combat. It's been around a very long time. If we searchingly look through history, honestly, we find it in uncomfortable places. In the crusade, in which the European Christians seized Jerusalem, they burned a mosque, slaughtered three hundred Jews and killed every mother and child on the templemount who was a Muslim. But no campaign of terror standing on it's own without organized military combat has ever succeeded in all of human history. Indeed, it is not the purpose of terror to succeed militarily. It is the purpose of terror to terrify, and I would guess that a lot of young people in this audience today who have never lived through such a difficult crisis were understandably terrified. And what is sought from the terror is the people who are afraid.
 
First of all, in a vast and diverse country like ours ­ you see, we have got people here from just about every country, every racial and ethnic group and every religious heritage. What is sought is, first of all, to make us afraid of each other. And secondly, to make us afraid of the future. We are afraid to plan; afraid to invest, afraid to trust ­ that is what they seek. Therefore, terrorism cannot prevail unless we cooperate. It is not a military strategy, it is a psychological and human one. We have to give the people that attacked us permission to win, and I do not believe we are about to grant them that permission.
 
Mr. Bin Laden and his allies misjudge America. They think we are, fundamentally, a weak, greedy, selfish, materialistic people. They think we are weakened by our lack of a national religion and imposed social order. But, they are wrong. All Americans have been proud in these last days of the performance of our leaders, from the president, to the governor, to the mayor of New York, yes, to the senators. I am very proud of my wife and her colleagues, and the House and the Senate, but especially the people.
 
Hillary and I went to a Rosh HaShonah service the other night in our own little village of Chappaqua, where we lost a person out of the temple on September the 11th. And I met one of the two men there who escaped from the 84th floor of the World Trade Center carrying a disabled woman all the way to safety. When I went into the family crisis center the first day, a man came up to me and said to me: "Why Mr. President, I haven't seen you since Oklahoma City." And I said, "How did I see you there?" He said, "You came to console me. My wife was blown up in the bombing of Oklahoma City and I had no one to talk to. So when I saw that this happened, I went in to my job and I told my boss I was taking two weeks off, and I got in my car and I drove here, and I sit here all day, every day talking to people. I had no one to talk to and I thought I might be of help."
 
I have visited many of the firemen. The fire department is a marvelous organization in the modern world. It's more like a medieval army, where instead of sitting behind and issuing orders, the leaders lead. And so in our fire department, we lost the chief, his three top aides, the chaplain and some 200 other officers ­ three hundred and forty killed ­ necessitating over two hundred promotions, because no one took a backseat when it came to sacrifice. I think those who believed that we would be weakened by this have misjudged us. All over America, there has been a tremendous outpouring of caring ­ over six hundred million dollars given by Americans. ­ everything from a dollar to a million. I thank the workers and the people at Yale for the work you did, for those who have lost loved ones or feared they had, in caring for them here. We are going to be all right.
 
Still, we must realize that we have a formidable adversary and a difficult challenge. Partly, because in every conflict throughout human history, defense lags offense by a little bit, and we got caught not being caught up. This has always happened. But so far, the human race is still around because self preservation and decency catches up and triumphs. Nevertheless, I think we have to take this seriously and see it for exactly what it is ­ I believe we are engaged in the first great struggle for the soul of the twenty-first century. We must understand terrorism in the context of the modern world, and we must ask ourselves what we have to do, not only to prevent terrorism and protect ourselves, but to undermine the conditions and attitudes that bring to the terrorists' banner their foot soldiers and sympathizers.
 
If I had asked you on September the tenth, the following question, what would your answer be? What is the dominant trait of the world in the early twenty-first century? If you are an optimistic person, it seems to me you might have given one of four answers. You might have said, "Well, it's the globalization of the economy and culture that has lifted more people out of poverty in the last twenty years than any time in all history and brought America unparalleled wealth and opportunities, including the opportunity for first immigrants from all over the world."
 
Or you might have said, if you are a "techie," "It is the information technology revolution."
 
When I became president in January of 1993, there were fifty sites on the World Wide Web.When I left office, there were three hundred and fifty million. There was never anything like it in the history of communications.
 
Or you might have said, if you were a scientist, "It's the evolution in the sciences." We're going to find out what's in the black holes in outer space. Last year, we found two new species of life, in two previously unexplored rivers. The human genome has been sequenced and soon women will bring home babies from the hospital with little gene cards saying, "Here are the kid's problems and the kid's strengths." And very soon, babies born in America and any country with a good health system will have a life expectancy in excess of ninety years. We have scientists working on digital chips to replicate the nerve functions of damaged nerves in the spinal cord, and raising the prospect that what a chip might do for a spine is like what a pacemaker might do for the heart. And people thought permanently paralyzed might get up and walk, and all of this is truly amazing.
 
Or if you are a political scientist, you might say the dominant trait of this period is the explosion of democracy around the world and diversity at home. Just for the last three years, for the first time in human history, more than half the world lives under governments of their own choosing. It has never happened before. And in our country and indeed in most other countries with a strong economy, there is an absolute explosion of diversity. America is a lot more interesting place than it was 30 years ago. If we had this meeting thirty years ago, you wouldn't look like you do. And it's a lot more fun to be here, and a lot more educational and a lot more exciting because of that.
 
It seems to me if you are optimistic, on September the 10th, when I said "what is the dominant strength of the twenty first century world," you could have given one of those four answers: The global economy; information technology; the explosion of democracy around the world and diversity; and the scientific evolution.
 
On the other hand, if you are a little more pessimistic, or if you are what Hillary refers to in our family, as her being the "designated worrier," you might have mentioned four negative things. You might have said all those positive things are just fine, but the environmental crisis facing us is so great that they all threaten to engulf all the progress and let it go away. Nine of the hottest years ever recorded occurred in the last 12. If the climate warms at the same rate in the next fifty years, as it has in the last ten, we will lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island, the Pacific island nations, and the Florida everglades that I worked so hard to protect. Agriculture will be disrupted all over the world and millions and millions of food refugees will be created and there will be a lot more violence out there. There is a terrible water shortage in the world already, and one in four people on the globe never gets a clean glass of water. There is a serious deterioration in the quality of our oceans which are responsible for so much of our oxygen And you could say it doesn't look to me like there is much going on about this, and if we don't reverse these, we will be having terrible problems.
 
Or you could say, "No, no, before that happens, we will be engulfed by health crises, the breakdown of health systems all over the world." This year, one in four people in the world will die of AIDS, TB, malaria or infections related to diarrhea. Thirty-six million people will have AIDS. Within five years, a hundred million will. The fastest growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe's back door, and in the Caribbean on our front door, and in India, the world's greatest democracy. And China just admitted they have twice as many AIDS cases as they had previously thought. And only four percent of the adults know how the disease is contracted and spread. You could say, when we have a hundred million AIDS cases, it will collapse a lot of these democracies, and it is a recipe for total turmoil and violence.
 
Or you could say, "No, the real problem is the flip side of globalization." Half the world's people aren't a part of it. It is true that more people have been lifted out of poverty by globalization in the last twenty years than ever before. It is also true that half the people in the world still live on less than two dollars a day, that a billion of our people still live on less than a dollar a day. Think about it the next time you buy a cup of coffee: A billion go to bed hungry every night. One woman dies every minute in childbirth, and that is a recipe for revolution, compounded by the fact that a hundred million of our children on the globe never go to school at all ­ half the kids in Africa, and a quarter of the kids in East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. So you might have said that.
 
Or even on September tenth, you might have said, "No, the biggest problem is going to be terrorism, coupled with weapons of mass destruction and rooted in racial and religious and ethnic hatred." And here is what I would like to say: Whether you would have given a positive answer, or a negative answer, there is something that all eight of these elements, positive and negative, have in common. They all reflect the astonishing increase in global interdependence, the extent of which we have seen the collapse of distances and barriers, bringing us closer together for good or ill. Terrorism is simply the dark side of our increasing interdependence. We have not repealed human nature or the fact some people see reality very differently than we do. And it was inevitable, if we take down all the barriers, if we open the society, that people who represent organized forces of destruction would take advantage of the very forces which have made us richer, more diverse, and made our lives better. Therefore, all the great questions of the twenty-first century boil down to one: Is this new age going to be good or bad, on balance, for me, my family, my community, my nation and the world?
 
That's why Yale's mission in its fourth century ­ to build a truly global university ­ is so important. It is very important that it be good. I was delighted, Mr. President, when my former deputy secretary of state and my old roommate, Strobe Talbott, became the head of the new (Yale) Center for the Study of Globalization, and his wife agreed to run the World Fellows Program. Actually, I said I would like to be a world fellow, and I was informed that I no longer qualify as a young leader. So today, you are stuck with my opinions without the benefit of further Yale study.
 
What do we have to do to make sure that we encourage the positive forces of interdependence, and that we restrain and combat the negative ones? I'd like to make three points: First, first things first. We have to defend ourselves against terrorism. I want you to know ­ if you don't ­ that there are good people, lots of them, who have been working on this for years. And I want you to know that there were many, many more attacks that were planned on the United States which were thwarted by career public servants, and on our allies. In the last millennium alone, there were plans for a bomb in Boston, a bomb in Seattle, a bomb for Los Angeles airport, a bomb at the biggest hotel in Amman, Jordan, and at one of the holiest Christian sites in the Holy Land, and a half dozen other plans all thwarted. There are good people who are working hard. Nonetheless, clearly, there is more to do to build our defenses, to build our ability to be offensive, to build our capacity to maximize computer networks to follow people who mean us harm. I don't want to say more about that right now because the president and his national security teams and our allies have some tough tactical decisions to make. And I think we ought to stick with them and give them the room they need to make decisions. So far, they have been making good decisions and we have no reason to believe that they won't do so in the future. I think on this, it's important for America to stay united. We are and we must stay that way. And I will say again, I know it was frightening to have the first massive attack on American soil. And nothing can minimize the human loss.

But let me remind the young people here that the century we just left was the bloodiest in all human history. Twelve million died in World War I, twenty million in World War II, and another twenty million from government oppression after the war, not counting the millions who died in Korea and Vietnam, and later in the senseless slaughter from Ruanda to Bosnia. And the world has never been free of violence. We took down the walls and collapsed the distances. We were interdependent and, therefore, all the things that we have benefited from in this global economy, sharing with it the price tag of being vulnerable to those who would do us harm. But we will catch up and this will be handled. What we have to do as citizens is to think about what else has to be done and what else we personally can do. We have to lead an assault on the conditions of negative interdependence and create more opportunities for positive interdependence. America should continue to work to reduce poverty and spread the benefits of globalization to people in countries that haven't felt it, with things like more debt relief, more micro-credit, more sensible trade.
 
America should contribute its fair share to the secretary general's health fund to fight the spread of the AIDS epidemic and other health problems. America should deal with the challenge of climate change through conservation through the development of alternative energy, through helping our friends and neighbors throughout the world do the same. America should continue to promote democracy. One particular problem we have, in the present crisis, is that so many people who hear the siren song of radical Islamic fundamentalism ­ the twisting of the reading of the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed ­ live in countries growing ever larger, ever younger and ever poorer where there is no democracy or chance to express dissent, or even assent, in a normal political way. And it keeps the populace in a state of sort of permanent infancy, in which you never have to take responsibility for your own lives and making it better because you never get to take responsibility.
 
And therefore it is very easy to listen to someone say your problems were caused by America's success. It's a hard case to make, because people from all of those countries come to America and share in that success. It's a hard case to make, because America last used military power to protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. It's a hard case to make, because America led the world in the most sweeping and important debt relief endeavor because the money had to be used by poor countries for education, medical care and development and nothing else. But nonetheless, if you never get to vote for office, you never get to stand up in a public forum and say what you think. You are permanently disempowered. And you can hear the siren song: It is all because of America. So, we have to keep urging our friends to find ways to move to greater democracy and freedom.
 
And finally let me say this: Even more important than what we do, is who we are. We must understand that this present conflict, as agonizing as the loss was, is about far more than the buildings collapsing and the people dying. This is about a global force with a fundamentally different view of the nature of truth, the value of life, the character of human community. Mr. Bin Laden and the Taliban believe they have the truth, and everybody that agrees with them is good, and everybody that doesn't is evil. This great university is dedicated to the proposition that nobody has the absolute truth. We all get to vote. We have the right to freedom of speech. We have the right of freedom of religion. And we have the right of freedom of assembly. And we have the responsibilities of a free people because we believe that, fundamentally, life is a journey because we move closer and closer to the truth. But because we are finite, limited human beings, we never will achieve it. Therefore, we don't have the right to impose our iron will on others. Instead, we try to work with others, and the more the merrier, and the thought that, with honest effort, together we might find more truth ­ that is a fundamental difference ­ and it leads people to a different view of the value of human life.
 
Because we believe that we are all traveling on this journey together, we have come, over time, more and more and more to value all life. To think that everybody counts, that everybody deserves a chance. But for them, they believe there are three kinds of people: There are the people that will embrace their particular views of Islam; and then there are the Muslims, who don't agree with their reading of the Koran, who keep citing surrahs like "God, Allah, put different people on the earth, not that they might despise one another, but that they might get to know one another and learn from one another." They hate that one in Afghanistan. People who believe that are heretics to them. And the rest of us who are not Muslims are infidels. We are all combatants in the war and we all deserve whatever happens to us, including death, even if it's a six year old girl who decided, on the morning of September 11, to go with her mother to work in the World Trade Center.
 
Of all the things that I have seen and been moved by this last few weeks, the thing I will carry with me to the grave, is the lines of the victims families holding their little flyers. Because, for days and days and days, people didn't know whether their loved ones were in the building when it was hit. So they all made up flyers, and they had pictures of their loved ones. "This is my wife, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mother, my father, my child. Here is the picture." And outside, often in handwriting, "This is what floor they were on, this is how tall they were, this is how much they weighed." All these people holding these pictures ­ there were Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Japanese, Chinese, British, and German, Mexicans, Chileans. There were people from every conceivable religious faith. They were all there, a stunning rebuke to the people who thought they had the right to kill them because they had the whole truth.
 
We believe in a different character of community. We believe we all do better when we work together. And all you have to do in our country is to accept the rules of engagement ­ our rules about everybody counting, everybody getting a voice, everybody getting to vote. People that will have to show up every day to do what is right. It gives us the freedom to celebrate our diversity, that we can be united by our common humanity. Their community is not united by common humanity ­ it is united by what it is not.
 
And Mr. Bin Laden has a political agenda. He wants to take over Saudi Arabia, get rid of Israel and purge the whole Middle East in the process, so they all look like the Taliban. What a dreary world. We have seen in the pictures what we have seen on television from that movie, "Behind the Veil," what their ideas are like: forcing women to wear those horrible burquas, and beating them with sticks in public and worse. But this is a formidable adversary because they do not believe they are evil. They believe they are doing good.
 
The most important thing over and above anything we do is that we have, in our minds clearly, the world we are trying to make ­ that our wealth is not an end in itself, but a tool to allow people to live up to their God-given abilities, that we keep struggling to get beyond these categories of difference to our common humanity. And we should never be blind to how difficult it is going to be.
 
Think of the great spirits of the last fifty years: Ghandi killed, not by a Pakistani Muslim, but one of his own Hindus, who hated him because he wanted India for the Muslims, the Sikhs, for everybody; Sadat, killed by the organization that Mr. Bin Laden's number two heads now, not by an Israeli, but by an Egyptian who hated him for reaching across the religious and ethnic bloody divide to make peace; my friend, Itzhak Rabin ­ a lifetime defending Israel ­ killed, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli who hated him because he wanted to lay down arms and take up peace. This is hard.
 
I thank God that, of all the great spirits of the last fifty years, Mandela survived, probably only because he first had to pay with twenty-seven years of the best years of the his life being in jail. It is hard to get people beyond the notion that they are defined by their differences and not by their common humanity. But you can do it by living it and you can do it by recognizing that it is time to take America's eternal mission to the world ­ a mission to widen the circle of opportunity, to deepen the meaning of freedom, to strengthen the bonds of community. We can no longer deny to others what we claim for ourselves. That is the ultimate lesson for the interdependent world.
 
We are going to get through this crisis. Our leaders are going to make good decisions. But in the end, we not only have to stop bad things from happening, we have to build for you, the best, the most prosperous, the most peaceful and most exciting time the world has ever known. And we can do it, if we remember who we are and what we believe.
 
Thank you and God bless you.