Remarks at a Reception for Representative Alcee Hastings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 20, 1999

Audience members. No!

The President. No. Now, when I became President, nobody thought we could get the crime rate down. They thought the crime rate went in one direction only--up. Okay, now we know it goes down. I propose that in the year 2000 we have a decent goal. We say we're going to keep working till America is the safest big country in the world.

I believe there are lots of other things I could say--and I'm trying to save the Everglades, you know--and I just want to say this one thing about the environment. The young people here, if they're going to have the kind of America they deserve, are going to have to accept the fact that you can improve the environment and grow the economy at the same time. And as soon as we--look, since I became President, the air's cleaner; the water's cleaner. We've set aside more land than any administration except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We've cleaned up all these dumps. Let me tell you something. We better start thinking that we should be improving the environment as we grow the economy, not destroying the environment as we grow the economy.

But the last thing I want to say is this. I'll just give you one other. You ought to go home tonight and ask yourself what you think the big challenges are. Go home and make your own list. But I'll tell you, if somebody said to me tonight, "Well, Mr. President, you don't have 14 more months; you've got to leave tomorrow. But I'm the genie, and I'll give you one wish. You can do anything for America you want, but only one." What I would choose is for us to be one America, across all the lines that divide us, for two reasons. First of all, we'll never be what we ought to be as long as we still have hate crimes--where some guy in the Midwest that belongs to a church he says doesn't believe in God but believes in white supremacy, goes out and kills in rapid succession an AfricanAmerican former college basketball coach, and then kills a Korean Christian walking out of his church. An angry guy out in Los Angeles shoots a bunch of Jewish kids going to a church school, a synagogue school, and then goes out and murde rs a Filipino postman--and the guy thought he had a twofer. He had an Asian and somebody who worked for the Federal Government. James Byrd gets dragged to death in Texas. Matthew Shepard gets put on a rack.

Yesterday, all over America, there were gripping pictures of these two young soldiers, one 21, one 18. The 21-year-old, a gay soldier who the 18-year-old beat to death with a baseball bat. And I thought to myself, looking at these two young boys--keep in mind, I look at them in a certain way not only because they're young enough to be my own sons, but because I have a lot of your sons under my command. Those young men, when they put on that uniform--both of them--when they put on that uniform, they basically took an oath that says, "If Bill Clinton tells me to, I will go halfway around the world to fight and die." That's what it means. Let's not kid. That's what it means.