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telling you something, my fellow Americans, if you want me to be able to 
be an effective President so that we can compete in the global economy, 
so that we can have enough tax money to invest in education and training 
and new technologies, so that we can bring this deficit down, and so 
that we can deal with the health care problems of the country, we have 
got to address this problem, and we must do it now.
    Just as I said before, just as it was true that last year, if it 
hadn't been for the Ways and Means Committee and the leadership of the 
chairman, there would have been no economic plan and no North American 
Free Trade Agreement. Remember this: Welfare reform and health care have 
to come through the Ways and Means Committee and have to go through the 
kind of terrible rhetorical divide you have been seeing filling your 
airways with all kinds of misinformation, trying to scare people off of 
dealing with health care. If we're going to cool down our rhetoric and 
stiffen our spines and open our minds and heart, we have got to have 
leadership in the Congress from people who are willing to take the tough 
stands, make the tough decisions, and make the right kind of future. 
This whole business is about getting people together and getting things 
done.

[[Page 388]]

    Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, do you realize that 90 
percent of what we are so obsessed with in the moment, no one will ever 
be able to remember? What this is about is getting people together and 
getting things done. And this is a city that understands that. That's 
the kind of mayor you have. That's what this community college is all 
about, getting things done. And if you want me to get things done, you 
have to say to the Members of Congress, ``act.'' The one person you 
don't have to say it to is Dan Rostenkowski. It's in his bones, and he 
will do it, too. Thank you.
    Let me just say one thing in closing. Sometimes I think Chicago 
works better than some other cities because you are instinctively, I 
think, maybe better organized. You understand community roots and deep 
ties and binds. I look around here and I see these health care 
professionals, I see these fine police officers in their uniforms. You 
know, there are a lot of things we have to face in this country that the 
President and the Congress can't fix alone. Teachers still teach kids in 
classrooms a long way from Washington. Police officers walk beats on 
streets a long way from Washington. There is nothing I can do except to 
try to help you have the opportunity, those of you who are students 
here, to have a better education and the opportunity to have the jobs if 
you get the education. You still have to seize it.
    So the last thing I wish to say to you is, if we are going to meet 
our obligations to the future, every one of us has got to ask ourselves, 
what do we have to do as citizens to keep these kids alive, to give them 
a better future, to make sure that the education is there, to invest in 
the areas that we have run off and left, to build a better future? We 
have serious obligations. We are coming to the end of a century; we are 
coming to the end of a millennium; we are going into a whole new era in 
world history. And we, we have to meet our obligations if we're going to 
keep the American dream alive in that era. I'm going to do my best, and 
I hope you will too.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:16 a.m. in the gymnasium. In his 
remarks, he referred to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Raymond Le 
Fevour, president, Wilbur Wright College.


<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
 [frwais.access.gpo.gov]


[Page 388-396]
 
Monday, March 7, 1994
 
Volume 30--Number 9
Pages 375-440
 
Week Ending Friday, March 4, 1994
 
Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at Hillcrest High School in 
Country Club Hills, Illinois

February 28, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. I 
thank you for your warm reception, and I do mean warm reception. I'm 
sorry it's so warm, but they had to put the lights up so that the 
cameras will put you all on the news tonight. So see, it's not so bad 
now, is it, what do you think about that? [Laughter]
    I want to thank my good friend Congressman Mel Reynolds for 
arranging for me to come here and to be with you today and for the 
leadership that he is already displaying in his career in Congress. He 
is a great credit to all of you here, and I think you would be very 
proud of the work that he does in Washington. I want to thank your 
principal, Gwendolyn Lee, for inviting me here and for the comments she 
made. She told me that her mother made dinner for Martin Luther King, 
when she was 11 years old. And she said her mother sent me a plate that 
he had dinner off of, so she sent me into a little room out here to have 
a snack off the same plate. So you see, even when you grow up you've got 
to try to do what your mama wants. [Laughter] I've spent most of my life 
doing that myself. I want to thank Starr Nelson for being here with us. 
I thought she was very well spoken. We knew exactly what she had to say, 
and she was brief. That makes you very popular if you're a speaker. 
[Laughter]
    Also I want to say I've heard good things about your music program 
here, so I hope before I leave I get to hear the band play. You guys 
have got to play a little for me. I also want to thank anybody in this 
whole student body who was responsible for putting together that 
statement up there, that letter for me. If every one of you believes 
that and lives by it, then I don't need to be here, I need to be 
somewhere else today. It's a very impressive statement and a real credit 
to your school.
    I came here today, as I think all of you know, to talk about the 
problem of crime and violence in our land and especially as it affects 
our young people. As the Congress comes back to work this week, it will 
be con- 

[[Page 389]]

sidering some very important education bills and some very important 
crime legislation. We know as a practical matter that we can never 
really be what we ought to be as a people until we are not only free of 
the scourge of violent crime but free of the fear of it. For the very 
fear of crime keeps 160,000 young people just like you home from school 
every day. Every day that's how many people we estimate don't go to 
school because they're afraid that if they do go, either at school or 
going to school or coming from school, they'll be shot or knifed or beat 
up or hurt in some way.
    I know that you understand that because last November two teens were 
shot and wounded within a week right outside your school. This kind of 
thing is happening all across the country, and we have got to do what we 
can to stop it--you and I together.
    The number of teens murdered by guns has doubled just since 1985. 
You think of that. We've been a country for over 200 years, and the 
number of our teenagers murdered by guns has doubled in less than 10 
years. One in 20 high school students carries a gun to school each day 
somewhere in America. I hope not here. But it happens. Some do it for 
protection. Some do it for the wrong reasons.
    More and more of our young people find themselves caught up in a 
cycle of violence. I just left the Wright Community College here in 
Chicago where I met a woman whose 22-year-old son was murdered by his 
best friend in just a fight over nothing; over nothing they were 
fighting. And she said when the young man was arraigned in court he said 
he missed his friend every day. I had another medical professional tell 
me that she looked into the face of a woman who had just lost her 
husband because his younger brother went in another room and got a gun 
and shot him down because they were fighting over which channel they 
were going to watch on television. And the guy had two little children--
people dying over nothing.
    I was in California a few months ago, and I did a town meeting--I'm 
going to that in a minute here, get rid of this microphone and just let 
you ask me questions--and I was in Sacramento, California, but we were 
hooked into three or four other towns and people all over the State 
could ask me questions. And this young man stood up and told a story of 
how he and his brother didn't want to be in a gang, didn't want to have 
any guns, didn't want to cause any trouble. And their school was unsafe, 
so they went to another school they thought was safer. And while they 
were standing in line to register at this safer school, some half-crazy 
person came into school and shot his brother standing right there in 
front of him in the line.
    These things are happening all over the country. Today, the Brady 
bill becomes law. It's a bill that will save some lives. It's a bill 
that will require that no place in America can anybody buy a gun until 
they've been checked for criminal background or mental health history. 
And we know that it will keep thousands and thousands of people from 
getting guns who would otherwise get them, commit crimes, and maybe even 
kill with them.
    We have done our best to deal with the problems, the special 
problems of assault weapons. We have a lot of evidence now that more and 
more people are hurt more grievously by guns when semiautomatics or 
assault weapons are involved because they're likely to have more bullets 
in their body. Today we banned an assault weapon called the ``street 
sweeper'' that was developed for crowd control in South Africa. To 
enforce apartheid in South Africa, to repress blacks in South Africa, 
that's what this gun was developed for--now not used anywhere, but 
manufactured in America so that people can get it and repress each other 
with it--no sporting purpose, no hunting purpose in this country.
    But we have more to do. Congress is also considering, as I said, the 
crime bill. Let me tell you a little bit about what it does, and then 
I'll open the floor and you can tell me what else you think we can do. 
The crime bill now before Congress would permit us to train and hire, 
working with cities, another 100,000 police officers to work not just to 
catch criminals but to walk the streets, to know the neighborhoods, to 
go into the schools, to meet and become friends and neighbors with the 
young people in the schools. Last month, as Mayor Welch reminded me, 
Country Club Hills received a

[[Page 390]]

grant for three new police officers from our Justice Department to do 
this kind of thing. We have seen evidence all across America, even in 
tough neighborhoods and big cities, that if there are enough police that 
are really walking the streets, knowing the families, knowing the young 
people, working with them, that a crime rate can go down by just 
creating an environment in which people don't commit crimes and feel 
that there is somebody secure and supportive there.
    So that's the first thing that this bill does. The second thing the 
bill does is to ban about 28 kinds of assault weapons. The third thing 
it does is to have a safe-schools provision which provides money to help 
provide security measures in schools but also to try to help young 
people resolve their differences in different ways. We forget--at least 
I say, ``we,'' not you but me, those of us who are older, who grew up in 
a different time, and who stayed busy all day doing other things--we 
forget that there are a lot of people who see people resolve their 
differences hours and hours and hours a day on television programs where 
the differences are always resolved with a fight or a shooting, and 
where there may not be someone else saying there's another way to do 
this. And so we're doing our best through this crime bill to give the 
schools and the communities of our country the means to bring good 
gifted people in to work with young people about how to resolve their 
differences, how to deal with anger, how to deal with frustration.
    Let me tell you something: We all feel anger. We all feel 
frustration. We all feel like we're being thwarted. There are always 
things that happen to all of us that we wish wouldn't happen and where 
we want to double up our fist or pick up a stick or something. But we 
learn not to do that. You have to learn not to do that in a society 
where you're really going to be civilized and recognize one another's 
rights. That's what we're struggling for in Bosnia today. That's what we 
hope for the people of all those countries in Africa which are embroiled 
in civil wars. And that's what we have to hope for our own people, that 
we can decide that we can do that. And in the end, that's what the 
people of the troubled Middle East are going to have to decide: if they 
can resolve their differences without killing each other.
    So this is a big deal. And this is what is in the crime bill. The 
crime bill has tougher punishment. It recognizes that most of the really 
serious crimes are committed by a small number of people, so if you 
commit three serious violent crimes that hurt people, sequentially, you 
won't be eligible for parole anymore. But most people who are in prison 
are going to get out. And most people can be helped before they commit 
crimes. So we try to find ways to deal with all these other issues.
    I can't help saying one thing about drugs that I think is important, 
and that is that we see some evidence now that drug use, after going 
down among young people for several years, may now be on the rise again. 
And I just have to tell you that one of the things that I learn every 
day as President is to be a little humble about what I can do. That is, 
I get up every day and I try to do what I can to make the future better 
for you. My job really is about guaranteeing the future for America, 
preparing America for the 21st century, trying to keep the American 
dream alive for you. I've lived most of my life, and I hope more than I 
can say that none of you have lived most of your lives. I hope the vast 
majority of your life is still out there ahead of you. But I know that 
there is a limit to what even the President can do. The President can't 
keep anybody off drugs. The President can't keep anybody from getting in 
trouble with the law. The President can't keep anybody from resorting to 
violence. These are decisions you have to make.
    And so I came here to this school today on the first day the Brady 
bill is effective--a bill for which people fought for 7 years to give 
you a better chance to be free of violence--to tell you that we're going 
to keep on fighting against violence. We're going to fight for more 
police. We're going to fight to have them be friends of the community. 
We're going to fight for tougher penalties, but we're going to fight for 
better chances, for young people to have things to say ``yes'' to.
    But in the end, what matters more than all of that is whether you 
believe what's up there on that wall. And if I do my part and

[[Page 391]]

the Congressman does his, and the teachers and the administrators do 
theirs, and all these parents and others who are here today do theirs, 
in the end what still counts is whether you believe what's on that wall. 
But if we, your parents and your grandparents, will assume our 
responsibility to deal with these tough problems now, and you will 
believe what's on that wall, then I believe that you will grow up in the 
most exciting time this country has ever known. And if we don't, if we 
don't do our part and you don't do yours, then what you saw here when 
those people were shot outside this school a few months ago is the 
beginning of just how bad it can be. The choice is yours. The choice is 
ours. I'm going to make my choice for your future. And that's the choice 
I want you to make, too. Thank you very much.
    Now, where are the microphones out here? One, two, three. Okay wave 
them. Just make sure everybody can see. One, two, three. So if you have 
a question or a comment, get it to the microphone. Tell us your name and 
what class you're in.

Health Care Reform

    Q. I'm a sophomore here at Hillcrest High School. I was just 
wondering, if I were a graduating senior who planned to work full-time 
next year, what should I expect to pay in general medical expenses under 
your health care reform program?
    The President. Good question. Good question. You should expect to 
pay, again, depending on how much you make, you should expect to pay 
about 2 percent of your payroll out of your pocket if you work for 
someone else. And your employer would pay somewhere between just under 4 
percent and just under 8 percent of your payroll, depending on how big 
your workplace is and what the average payroll of the people working 
there is.
    Now, having said that, let me get in a little plug. I just had some 
statistics given to me that I'll give back to you that relate not so 
much to health care but to your decision to go to work after you get out 
of high school. In 1992, the unemployment rate among high school 
dropouts nationwide was over 11 percent, and that included people 40 and 
50 years old. For younger people it was much, much higher. Okay? The 
unemployment rate for high school graduates was 7.2 percent. The 
unemployment rate for people that had had at least 2 years of a 
community college or further training was 5.2 percent. And the 
unemployment rate for college graduates was 3.5 percent. In 1992, the 
average high school graduate made $4,000 a year more than the average 
high school dropout; and the average person who had a high school 
diploma and at least 2 years of further training made another $4,000 
more.
    So my answer is, if you go to work when you get out of high school, 
enroll in a community college at night or something else and get further 
education and training so you can get your income up. Then you won't 
mind paying for health care. [Laughter]

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