Bill Clinton: “So are we, like, 9 times more stupid than--you see where I'm going with this? Look, I grew up--I was shooting cans off…”

“So are we, like, 9 times more stupid than--you see where I'm going with this? Look, I grew up--I was shooting cans off fenceposts with .22's when I was 12 years old. I governed a State where we shut factories and schools down on the opening day of deer season because there wouldn't be anybody there anyway. [Laughter] But this is madness, to let people go to gun shows and buy guns with criminal records and go out and shoot people when you can stop it. And don't let anybody tell you we can't do something with reasonable restraints; 400,000 people have not been able to get guns because they have criminal backgrounds since the Brady bill passed. And don't you kid yourself for a minute; that's one of the reasons we've got the lowest crime rate in 26 years. Let's make America the safest big country in the world. And I want to say just two other things, one thing that people normally--maybe you wouldn't see raised in a group like this. But I think environmental issues are too little discussed outside environmental groups. You know, the economy has gotten better in the last 7 years; the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the food is safer; we set aside more land than any administration in history, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. But we're still in the grip of a big idea that's not right anymore. Most of you now believe--I think you do--that global warming is real. I hope you do. Nine of the 11 hottest years in the last 500 years have been in the last 12 years. If this thing happens--I just was down in New Zealand near the South Pole, the polar ice cap melting, big chunks of it coming off. If the planet heats too much, the polar ice caps melt, the water level rises, island nations can be flooded. Sections of Louisiana and Florida can be flooded. The whole center of agriculture, the people who produce our food that we live by, will be moved to the north, changing and disrupting societies. This is a big deal. You have malaria now today in places in Africa where it has never been before at altitudes it has never been before because the mosquitoes are going higher because it's hotter up there. This is a serious thing. Now, what's that got to do with all of you? It's a big deal. For a long time, it was true that you could not build a rich country unless you put more greenhouse gases into the air by burning coal and oil. It was true. But it isn't true anymore, and most people still think it is. So the Indians and the Chinese, they think they can't get rich, and when I tell them they don't have to do this, they think, ``old Bill Clinton's trying to hold us down on the farm.'' In America, in Congress, there are people who think that I have some dark plan to wreck the American economy. Well, if I wanted to wreck the American economy, I've done a poor job of it. But I'm telling you, we now can conserve our way to greater wealth. We will be a wealthier country if we are environmentally responsible. We will be a wealthier planet if we protect the Earth. And the young people in this room, you mark my words. Someday you'll remember I said this; 10 years from now, if you go to one of these events, I'll bet you environmental issues take up 30 percent of the discussion, maybe more. So why don't we turn it around now while we can? Why don't we say we'll make America the first country in the world to give up an idea that's not true anymore and embrace the future? The last thing I want to say is this. The thing I most worry about of all is that we're on the verge of a new millennium with these unbelievable technologies and these unbelievable scientific discoveries; a lot of the young women in this room tonight will have babies in the future, will have your children after the human genome project is completed and we have decoded all the mysteries of the human gene. So literally, this might start in 5 years. You have a baby, and then you come home from the hospital, and you have a road map of you child's future. And it's a little scary because it says, well, your child may be more likely to develop heart disease at an earlier age, but it will also say, but if you do these five things for the first 10 years of his or her life, you'll add another 20 years to their life. The average 65-year-old person today has a life expectancy of 82. The children--Quincy said thank you. [Laughter] You think about this. Think about young mothers bringing home their children thinking their kids are going to be 90 or 100 years old, and they'll be alert and active and healthy and strong. It will be great. So you've got all this, and we're all hooked in on the Internet, and all this stuff is happening. And whoop-dee-doo, and it's wonderful. And there are more rich people than ever before. But what is the biggest problem in the world today? What do I spend my time worrying about? That there are still people who insist upon killing each other and preventing the children of their areas from having a decent future because of their racial, their ethnic, their religious, their tribal differences. And what's the biggest problem we're dealing with in America today? From the bombing in Oklahoma City to stretching poor, young Matthew Shepard out on a rack and killing him a year ago in Wyoming this week to dragging James Byrd until he came apart, literally, in Texas to what happened out here at the Jewish school and with the Filipino postalworker to what happened in Illinois and Indiana with that young man who was a member of a church that said they didn't believe in God but they did believe in white supremacy, so he went--he murdered a former basketball coach at Northwestern and murdered a young Korean coming out of church--the guy was coming out of a church and he got shot in the back and killed--what do all these people have in common? They are on the verge of a new millennium that is the most modern of times, absolutely in the grip of the most primitive and ancient of hatreds, the fear, the hatred, and the dehumanization of people who are different from them. And that's the last thing I want to say to you. All these other things I've said to you are important, but they're by and large mental problems. This is a spiritual problem. But it should be part of the political platform of any group of citizens that really seeks to make the future America's greatest days. You have to ask yourself if you really believe that what we share in common is more important than what divides us. And if you just think about it, I mean, here, we're--I'm trying to get this thing done in Northern Ireland, where my people grew up--in my family there were both Catholics and Protestants, and they lived on the line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and this has been going on for a few hundred years now. It's not like we're unacquainted with the issues. And they've been fighting for 30 years, and now they've all agreed what to do and everybody's agreed that they all have to do what they're supposed to do and everybody's agreed they all have to do what they're supposed to do by a certain date. And a lot of people are prepared to let it all go back to smithereens again because they want to have an argument about who goes first, like you used to have when you were 6 or 7 years old on the playground. I'm just telling you, just think about it. Look, we all wake up every day with, like, little scales inside of hope and fear and light and darkness. We all do. Everybody has bad days. But it is unbelievable that we're almost in a new millennium and the world is in a grip of this level of primitive hatred and destruction. My party believes that we are one America. My party believes that I did the right thing in trying to stop the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia and the Albanians in Kosovo. I believe that when my child is my age, she will live in a golden age if, but only if, we have married all this modern science and technology to a higher level of humanity. Thank you very much. [At this point, dinner host Clarence Avant, chairman, Motown Record Co., made brief remarks and presented a gift to the President.]”