Remarks to the American Association of Community Colleges in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 1, 1995

Thank you very much. Secretary Riley, thank you for your introduction. If I were you, I would go bowling. [Laughter] We're going to save your job. [Laughter] Thank you, Secretary Reich, for your enthusiasm, for being enthusiastic about the right things. In your heart alone you have enough domestic content to be the Secretary of Labor. Thank you, Jacquelyn Belcher and David Pierce. I also want to say how very glad I am to be joined here by the distinguished United States Senator from Minnesota, Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife, Sheila, who's here. Two of our colleagues in the House of Representatives, Congressman Bruce Vento and Congressman Bill Luther, also back there. Thank you for being here.

I want to say a special word of congratulations to the 20 students who were named to the 1995 All-USA Academic Team. I want to thank those who are watching us via satellite. And I also want to say a special word about some fine students and advocates I met just before I came in here. I met two students who have benefited from our direct loan program. I'll talk more about them in a moment. Two students who are critically interested in public assistance to education, because without that they would not have been able to go to school. And I met a gentleman who is devoting his time to organizing people against the attempt in Washington to start charging interest on student loans while students are still in college. Sandra Tinsley, Jessica Aviles, Jeffrey Lanes, Robbie Dalton-Kirtley, who is also one of the academic team all Americans, and Dave Dahlgren, I thank all of them for meeting with me, and they're here somewhere. If they are, they ought to wave or stand up - there's Jeffrey. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Before I begin today to talk about education and training, I'd like to say just a word or two if I might before this audience of educators and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free speech, about where we are in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing and what we are going to do about the kind of America our children will inherit.

Yesterday, Hillary and I joined tens of thousands of people in Oklahoma City, and of course millions of you all across the country, to witness the end result of abject hatred. I was there as President to represent all of you in the mourning. But also, I felt that we were there, Hillary and I, as ordinary American citizens well - as husband and wife, as parents, as neighbors of those people.

No words can do justice to how moving it was to be there yesterday. No words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in the rescue operation around the clock. And one person has already given her life in that endeavor. No words can do justice to the small acts of kindness and generosity, all the people in Oklahoma who won't take money at the gas station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at the airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to help them put their lives together.

But I will never forget, more than anything else, the faces and the stories of the family members of the victims. I was walking through the room shaking hands with them, and I saw a lady with her children who had been in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago as her husband left my Secret Service detail to go to what seemed to be a less hectic pace of duty in Oklahoma City. I saw the children of a man who was a football hero at the University of Arkansas when so many people who are now on the White House staff were friends of his. The young Air Force Sergeant took out two pictures his wife had taken of me just 3 weeks ago when I visited our troops in Haiti. And she was one of those troops, but she came home because we wound down our mission there, and she married her fiance. And 3 days later, she went to the Federal building to change her name. And so he had to give me the pictures his wife took. I saw three children, teenage children, with a woman and another child taking care of them. One of them had one of my Inaugural buttons on. Their mother died last year of an illness. Their father went to our Inaugural, and they asked me to sign the pin to their father who is still missing - three teenagers losing both parents.

I could go on and on and on. I say to all of you, first we must complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort. Of course, we must help that community rebuild. We must arrest, convict, and punish the people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our responsibility does not end there.

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see - I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.