Remarks at Frank W. Ballou Senior High School

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 7, 2000 by Bill Clinton

Victor Shen is a high school junior in Whittier, Alaska. He dreams of becoming a professional mathematician, but he lives in a small school in our largest but most rural State. So his school doesn't offer college-level calculus. His town is so remote that he's cut off from the whole rest of the world for several months every winter. But he will soon have the chance to take the classes he needs to pursue his dream of becoming a mathematician by getting on-line. It wouldn't be there.

It ought to be there for every person like him, in every rural area and every inner-city neighborhood in the entire United States of America. There are lots of Victor Shens out there. There are people in this high school who could become professional mathematicians, professional scientists. There are people like you in every community in this country. No one should be shut out of this.

Listen to this. Two years ago a man named Clinton Johnson lost his little bakery on 125th Street in Harlem in New York City. He had no savings to support his wife and two children. But he found a community technology center near his home, learned HTML code, and got himself a good job as a web developer.

Dale O'Reilley, a grandmother of two from Medford, New Jersey, was diagnosed 9 years ago with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Now, even though she can no longer move or speak, a special laptop computer allows her to give voice to her thoughts, and she continues to write newspaper articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The areas in America with the highest unemployment are our Native American reservations. I visited last year the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the home of the Oglala Sioux. The unemployment rate there is over 70 percent. We're all looking for new ways for them to find things to do. They have very gifted artists and crafts and making Native American products. This year I ordered Christmas gifts from the Pine Ridge reservation over the Internet. They would never be able to market their products across this Nation--never, ever. They wouldn't have the money to do it. But because they have a web page, people like us can find them and help them to build their dreams.

And before we came out here, I was talking to Steve about--I spent some time a few months ago with the executives of eBay out in Northern California. Some of you may have found eBay on the net. It's a trading site. And the company's going like crazy, because people love to buy and sell things. It's like an old-fashioned community like the farmers' market used to be in my hometown on Saturday morning. And people buy and sell all kinds of things on eBay. There are now over 20,000 Americans making a living, not working for eBay but buying and selling on the site, and many of them used to be on welfare. They found a way through the net to empower themselves through their minds to have a different future.

Now, this is just the beginning. We have only scratched the surface. Imagine what it will be like when every single child in this country can just stretch a hand across a keyboard and pull up every book ever written, every painting ever created, every symphony or jazz piece ever composed. When highspeed wireless networks bring distant learning and telemedicine to every rural area in this country. When even the smallest business can compete worldwide just because they have access to people across the world through the net.