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 1                    THE FRANK G. RAICHLE
 2                     LECTURE SERIES ON
 3                  LAW IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
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 5           Speaker:  Janet Reno, Attorney General
 6                    of the United States
 7
 8                   Monday, March 18, 1996
 9                 Student Center Auditorium
10                      Canisius College
11                     Buffalo, New York
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 1              ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO:  Thank you
 2    everybody here for making me feel so welcome this
 3    evening and for giving me the privilege to talk on
 4    the subject of law in the American Society.
 5              I love the law.  I love it for what it
 6    can do, protect people, protect the innocent, to
 7    hold the guilty accountable.  I'm glad I pursued
 8    the law.  It has been a wonderful experience and a
 9    great challenge filled with much diversity and so
10    many different fascinating and interesting issues
11    that impact on the human situation in this world.
12              But I like to think of the law mostly as
13    a problem solver.  And I fear that in this day and
14    time too many lawyers have forgotten their role as
15    problem solvers and have become too focused on too
16    small an arena to be truly effective in making the
17    law real for all Americans.
18              Let me give you some examples.  I would
19    watch in Miami as one of my prosecutors prosecuted
20    a young man with an obvious crack addiction.  He
21    would get some prison time because it was a second
22    or third offense but there was little follow up
23    until we focused on it, on what happened to that
24    person after he went to jail.  Did he get
25    treatment?  The prosecutor considered that his job

                                                       3
 1    was done when he got him convicted.  Or on other
 2    occasions the public defender would feel that he
 3    had won a big victory when he got his client off on
 4    a motion to dismiss, ignoring the fact that his
 5    client was in the grip of an addiction that was the
 6    worst prison than anything that man could
 7    manufacture for him with bars.  The public defender
 8    would feel that his job was over, although there
 9    was so much yet to be done in solving the real
10    problem that this person confronted, a problem made
11    all the more acute because he did not have cash to
12    pay for treatment.  He did not have health
13    insurance to pay for treatment and he did not know
14    where to turn next.
15              Or in other instances, you will see the
16    courts write a marvelously crafted opinion with
17    careful legal research involved.  The court, based
18    on this research, will direct somebody in
19    government to do something, to improve conditions
20    in an institution, to provide processes, all of
21    which cost money.  But the lawyer who was
22    responsible for securing that marvelous opinion and
23    the judges who write it, will not address the most
24    difficult issue of how we are going to pay for it
25    and how we, as lawyers, participate in the

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 1    organization of government so that the law is real
 2    for all Americans and the law means what it says.
 3              It is estimated now that approximately 70
 4    percent of the poor and the working poor in this
 5    country do not have access to a lawyer, much less
 6    to the courts.  Our real question is, how do we
 7    make the law real for all Americans?  And
 8    particularly, how do we make the law real for the
 9    young people of America today?
10              As the Attorney General of the United
11    States, as a prosecutor for 15 areas, I think the
12    greatest single prime problem we face in this
13    country today is youth violence.  We have seen a
14    dramatic increase since 1985.  But youth violence
15    is just one of the symptoms of this nation's
16    neglect of its children and of their families.
17    Teen pregnancy, teen suicide, drugs, drop-outs,
18    lack of skill, we have done so much to create risk
19    and danger for our children.  Now, has come the
20    time for us all as lawyers, as doctors, as
21    university professors, as students, as people who
22    care deeply about this nation to reweave the fabric
23    of the community around our young people at risk.
24    The signs on the horizon are ominous if we do not
25    act now.

                                                       5
 1              Lacking a vision of a productive
 2    adulthood and without constructive activities in
 3    which to participate, startling numbers of young
 4    people are engaging in self-destructive behavior,
 5    the crime, the violence, the drugs.  Too many of
 6    our children are dropping out of school and
 7    participating in gangs because they have no other
 8    place to go, no other place to belong.
 9    Instead of enjoying safety in their neighborhood,
10    kids face danger from crime and violence.  Instead
11    of a college education and economic security, they
12    face a lack of job training and employment
13    opportunity.  Instead of care and respect, they are
14    often neglected, abused and forgotten.  And without
15    clear and consistent adult support they feel
16    alienated from society.
17              While adult crime rates are down, the
18    same cannot be said for juvenile crime.  Between
19    1990 and 1994 juvenile crime rates shot up by 21
20    percent.  What makes this problem much worse is
21    that in 1990 there were only ten million juveniles
22    in this country age 15 to 17.  That number will
23    grow to 13.1 million by the year 2010, a 31 percent
24    increase.  This means that if the juvenile crime
25    rate stays the same, the number of crimes committed

                                                       6
 1    by young people will increase by one-third.  To put
 2    that in perspective, consider this.  In 1994, 2.7
 3    million juveniles were arrested for various
 4    offenses.  By the year 2010 that number will
 5    increase to 3.5 million.  Unless we do something
 6    about youth violence now, unless we do something
 7    about gangs and drugs and alcohol and drug abuse,
 8    the problem is only going to become more acute for
 9    the future.
10              And it is not just a matter of our
11    safety.  Unless we start structuring the government
12    and our institutions so that we make an investment
13    in children upfront, we are not going to have
14    people with the skills necessary to fill the jobs
15    to maintain this nation as a first rate nation.
16    Unless we make an investment in children now and
17    proper preventative medical care, we will bring
18    health care institutions to their knees through
19    remedial programs that had to be instituted because
20    we failed to invest upfront.
21              What leads to the problems that we are
22    seeing today?  I have alluded to them.  The best
23    study is the recent study of the Carnegie
24    Foundation which talks about the developmental
25    neglect of our children.  Focusing on early

                                                       7
 1    adolescence, the report notes that with high rates
 2    of divorce, increases in the number of families in
 3    which both parents work and the growth of
 4    single-parent families exacerbated by the erosion
 5    of neighborhood networks and other traditional
 6    support systems, children now spend significantly
 7    less time in the company of adults than they did
 8    just a few decades ago.
 9              In this environment is it any wonder that
10    by the age of 17 about 25 percent of all
11    adolescents have engaged in behavior that is
12    harmful to themselves or others.  If a child
13    doesn't have a parent, an older brother or sister,
14    a neighbor, a teacher, a clergyman to teach them
15    what is right and wrong, where will she learn?
16              Where do we begin?  People choose
17    different points along the route of the childhood
18    to intervene.  But let me give you the picture of
19    the whole and how lawyers and everyone in the
20    community must join together to give the child a
21    life as a whole.
22              I would pick up a pre-sentence
23    investigation of a child that I had prosecuted as a
24    delinquent for an armed robbery.  At age 17 he
25    would have been in trouble twice but even before he

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 1    got in trouble, you could see all along the way
 2    points that we might have intervened to make a
 3    difference in that child's life and to save that
 4    child from risk.  One of the first points that I
 5    noticed was the correlation between delinquency and
 6    dropouts.  And we developed a dropout prevention
 7    program to focus on middle schools.  But it became
 8    clear that you could not wait until the middle
 9    school because the child had already fallen grade
10    levels behind.  He was already developing a lack of
11    self-respect because people thought he was stupid.
12    You had to start early on in elementary school and
13    so we started with a neighborhood intervention
14    program.
15              But at that point, the crack epidemic hit
16    Miami early on in 1985.  And I had to figure out
17    what to do about crack involved infants and their
18    mothers.  Did I prosecute the mother, did I get the
19    child adjudicated dependent?
20              The doctors took me to our public
21    hospital to the neonatal unit, to the nursery which
22    was overwhelmed by children who could not be sent
23    home, by children who had not been talked to or
24    held except when changed and fed, children who
25    after six weeks were not beginning to respond with

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 1    human emotions, whereas across the nursery a child
 2    born with birth defects but with loving parents
 3    with her as much as possible around the clock, that
 4    child was beginning to respond through the pain
 5    with human response.
 6              And what those doctors and child
 7    developing people taught me then was so critically
 8    important, that the first three years of life are
 9    the most important in terms of shaping future human
10    behavior.  The 50 percent of all learned human
11    response is learned in the first year of life.
12    What good are all the educational opportunities
13    going to be ten years from now if that child does
14    not have the foundation for learning formed in
15    those first years.
16              The concept of reward and punishment and
17    a conscience is developed during the first three
18    years of life.  What good are all the prisons that
19    we might construct 18 years from now going to be if
20    the child doesn't understand what punishment is all
21    about?  We see more and more children without
22    supervision in those early years, without parents
23    who know how to be parents, more and more children
24    at risk for the rest of their lives and creating a
25    risk for all of us.

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 1              Now, what does that have to do with law
 2    in the American society?  For most of our history,
 3    parents were responsible for those first three
 4    years and they are by far and away the best
 5    caregiver.  But we see parents working, we see
 6    parents neglecting, we see parents indifferent.
 7    And how does government, how do the private and
 8    public institutions of this nation join together to
 9    give those children, those children who deserve to
10    be heard and who do not have a voice, the
11    opportunity to grow in a strong, constructive way.
12    That is the challenge for America's lawyers, for
13    our doctors, for citizens that care.  How do we
14    devise new systems that can deliver those services
15    and the best way possible?  Those are the issues
16    that we must face.
17              I am convinced that if we look at the
18    whole of the child's life, if we look at the whole
19    of the community rather than the narrow focus of
20    the courtroom, the narrow focus of the judicial
21    opinion, the narrow focus of a contract, that we as
22    lawyers and all others that care can make a
23    difference in the lives of America's children for
24    the future.
25              We begin by building careful piece by

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 1    piece.  I told the story earlier this evening but
 2    this is the way I approach it, with a lesson, one
 3    of the most important lessons I have learned in my
 4    life.  When I was about eight years old, we lived
 5    in a little wooden house.  There were four children
 6    in the family a year apart and we were outgrowing
 7    it rapidly.  My father did not have enough money to
 8    hire a contractor to build a larger house.  One
 9    afternoon my mother announced that she was going to
10    build a house.  We said, what do you know about
11    building a house?  She said, I'm going to learn.
12    She went to the brick mason and the electrician and
13    the plumber and she learned how to build a house.
14    And she dug the foundation with her own hands with
15    a pic and shovel, she laid the block, she put in
16    the wiring and the plumbing and my father would
17    help her with the heavy beams when he came home
18    from work at night.  She and I lived in that house
19    until she died in December just before I came to
20    Washington and it is still my home.
21              As I would drive down the little dirt
22    road towards that house and see it standing there,
23    no matter how difficult a problem I faced that day,
24    that house was the symbol to me that you can do
25    anything you really want to if you put your mind to

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 1    it and carefully build it.
 2              But that house taught me another very
 3    important lesson in August of 1992 when Hurricane
 4    Andrew hit our area directly.  About three o'clock
 5    in the morning my mother got up as the winds began
 6    to howl.  She was very old and frail and she sat
 7    down in her chair and she folded her hands and she
 8    looked totally unafraid for she knew how she had
 9    built that house.  She knew that she had not cut
10    corners, that she had used the best materials, that
11    she had done it the right way.
12              And I think we've got to look at what it
13    takes to raise children.  And as lawyers and as
14    citizens who care, as university professors, as
15    doctors, as students, as people who care, we've got
16    to figure out how to deliver services to our
17    youngsters who are at risk so that they have a
18    future.
19              Let us begin at the beginning with those
20    years zero to three.  How can we improve our
21    parenting skills?  Can we teach parenting in our
22    public schools?  If we have strong parents, we will
23    bring stronger children into this world.  Let us
24    make sure that they have appropriate health care.
25              As lawyers we should look at a nation

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 1    that doesn't make sense sometimes.  This is a
 2    nation that says to a person 70 years of age, you
 3    can have an operation that will extend your life
 4    expectancy by three years but we turn to the child
 5    of a working poor person who doesn't have money for
 6    medical care, who has no health care benefits.  And
 7    we say to that child, you can't get preventative
 8    medical care because your father makes too much
 9    money to be eligible for Medicaid but he doesn't
10    have any other resources.
11              At least for our children, we ought out
12    to be able to devise, as lawyers, as problem
13    solvers, as doctors and as citizens who care, a
14    system for delivering health care to our children
15    so that they can grow in a strong, constructive
16    way.  Let us make sure that our parents are
17    accountable for supporting their
18    children.
19              One of the most frustrating things is to
20    see what lawyers have done in the collection of
21    child support.  They've made it awfully
22    complicated.  It ought to be as easy to collect
23    child support as it is to collect income tax in
24    this country and the system ought to be as
25    effective.

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 1              Let us understand that violence is
 2    probably most often learned in the home.  Forty
 3    percent of the cases that I handled in Dade County
 4    at different times were estimated to arise, 40
 5    percent of the homicides from domestic violence,
 6    husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend,
 7    ex-spouse.  I never thought that I would see the
 8    direct correlation between that and youth violence
 9    but the American Psychological Association proves
10    what I have long sensed.  That unless we end
11    violence in the home, we are never going to end it
12    in the streets of this nation.  In a recent report
13    they pointed out that violence is a learned
14    behavior and that the home is one of the best
15    classrooms.
16              Let us take police and the court system
17    and the emergency room, let us take doctors and
18    lawyers together and through a joint criminal
19    justice public health initiative, let us focus on
20    domestic violence and say once and for all, we're
21    not going to tolerate it.  Let us make sure the
22    system is responsive, that instead of sending a
23    women to five different places to secure a
24    restraining order, to seek shelter, to seek
25    assistance, to seek support that we have one center

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 1    where that person can go in a simplified process
 2    that makes the law real for her and provides true
 3    protection.
 4              Let gets
 5    police, prosecutors and others involved so we can 
 6    get to the heart, to the very core of the whole
 7    area of child abuse.  Handling a child abuse case
 8    is one of the most dredging experiences that I
 9    know.  But that child who is abused grows up to be
10    the violent child.  We've got to intervene early 
11    both to protect the child from abuse and to
12    interrupt the cycle of violence.  Let us train
13    lawyers and police officers to work together to
14    identify the signs of child abuse early on and to
15    work with the court system and medical experts to
16    find the best solutions.
17              Let us understand how important education
18    is.  Something is terribly wrong with the nation
19    that's paying its Wall Street lawyers what they're
20    getting when they come out of law school and paying
21    those football players in the six-digit figures and
22    then pays the school teachers what we pay them.
23    These people are the most important person in a
24    child's life for a significant portion of that
25    child's life.  And somehow or another, we ought to

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 1    be able to structure teaching time so that they are
 2    free of bureaucracies, free of the red tape and
 3    that they are recognized by all the community for
 4    the work, the critical work they do with our
 5    children.  Let us make sure that we develop a
 6    program that can prevent children from leaving
 7    school, either through truancy or dropouts.
 8              But, again, we watch the system.  We will
 9    see a police officer do wonderful work with
10    truancy.  They'll take the truant third grader back
11    to school, the school will call home, the parent
12    will not come get the child and the school will
13    send the child home by the bus and nobody will
14    intervene and find out that that family is sliding
15    into danger and into risk.  Whereas, if we could
16    intervene effectively, we could have made a
17    difference.  Lawyers should be problem solvers,
18    working with community police officers, working
19    with public health nurses, to form a team to knock
20    on doors to find out what is wrong and to reach out
21    and hold out a helping hand to a family at risk of
22    greater danger.  But let us be creative in our
23    problem solving.
24              Lawyers sure can get fussy with each
25    other.  They can argue, they can advocate, they can

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 1    discuss and sound so fierce in the courtroom.  But
 2    the lawyers that I think are the most effective are
 3    those lawyers that can keep their clients out of
 4    the courtroom, those lawyers that know how to
 5    negotiate an issue so that both sides are pleased
 6    with the resolution.  It is so exciting to see what
 7    lawyers are doing across this country today
 8    volunteering their time in schools across this
 9    nation to teach our young people how to resolve
10    their conflicts without knives and guns and fists.
11    It is so exciting to see programs that are already
12    helping our children but we need to have more of
13    them, more like the thrive truancy reduction
14    initiative in Oklahoma City which led to a 29
15    percent decrease in truancy rates or the Bigs In
16    Blue mentoring program in Warren County, New
17    Jersey, which matches at risk youth with police
18    officer mentors and like the Resolving Conflict
19    Creatively program which has taught children in New
20    York and other states how to resolve conflicts
21    without violence.  Let us be creative in solving
22    problems rather than generating conflicts in the
23    courtroom.
24              But even if we do right in school, we
25    have got to understand the phenomenon that has

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 1    developed that the Carnegie Foundation's report
 2    refers to.  What are we going to do with our
 3    children in the afternoon and evening hours and on
 4    weekends and during the summer months when they are
 5    so at risk, when they are so alone, when they are
 6    so remote from structure and supervision.  That
 7    unsupervised time is key.  And every expert that I
 8    have talked to says, if I could find something to
 9    do for kids in the afternoon it would make such a
10    difference.
11              Young people that I've talked to who have
12    been in trouble or who are in trouble, when I ask
13    them, what could be done to have prevented the
14    trouble in the first place, tell me two things,
15    something to do the in non-school hours and
16    somebody to talk to, somebody who understands how
17    hard it is to grow up in America today, somebody
18    that can give me a pat on the back when I deserve
19    it, somebody who can chastise me when I deserve
20    that as well.  We can do so much if we understand
21    why kids are joining gangs.  That's the only place
22    they have a sense that they can belong.  Let us
23    give them positive alternatives.
24              Now, as I mentioned earlier in the day to
25    a group, one of the things that frustrates me and

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 1    one of the ways lawyers can start being problem
 2    solvers in the bigger picture is I'll go to a
 3    community meeting and the citizens will be asking
 4    City commission for a youth center for recreational
 5    programs and other programs for kids after school.
 6    A big capital expenditure.  I then turn and drive
 7    away and pass the school at 4:30 in the afternoon,
 8    it's locked and barred and not being used.  And I
 9    can't figure out why we can't develop a system
10    where the schools are used during the non-school
11    hours for recreational programs, family centers,
12    community centers.
13              Well, I'm told when I ask many school
14    officials, well, if you've got the problem of
15    liability, and this is a state system and that's a
16    county system, if we as lawyers and we as educators
17    and we as community participants who care can't
18    solve that problem, then we should find another
19    line of business.  We ought to be able to take our
20    resources and make a difference because that's
21    where the problem lies.  We have so many people who
22    care so much about getting something done but they
23    have so many choices to make.  Should I put it into
24    education, says the city councilman, or should I
25    put it into police?  Our monies are being cut

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 1    constantly and I don't begin to have the resources.
 2              Let's take an inventory of a community
 3    like Buffalo and look at what you have and then
 4    make sure that we are using every facility to the
 5    utmost, that we are using every resource, that we
 6    are not duplicating our efforts and that we are
 7    making that early investment upfront.  All of this
 8    would be difficult unless we address the immediate
 9    issue of the safety of our children.  Guns are
10    killing our kids.  Guns in the hands of kids are a
11    deadly combination--guns and drugs and alcohol.
12              If we, again, use the innovative sense
13    that we should be about, if we can look at what
14    works and what doesn't work, we can develop
15    treatment programs for our kids that can keep them
16    out of drugs that they've gotten into them.  We can
17    focus on those in the neighborhood who are dealing
18    drugs with children and get them out of the
19    neighborhood and send them to prison where they
20    belong.  We can work together, state and federal
21    and local law enforcement to trace the guns that
22    come from other states or from other sources and
23    take effective action.  But we have got to speak
24    out and make sure that we focus on the safety of
25    our children.  That's why it's so exciting to see

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 1    community policing beginning to work across the
 2    country and here in Buffalo.  Police officers who
 3    relate to the neighborhood, relate to kids and
 4    build the trust of kids.
 5                All the law in the world wouldn't make
 6    any difference if kids can't trust the people who
 7    enforce the law.  And when you see a community
 8    police officer whose developed the trust of kids,
 9    kids can look up to him and say, that's my mentor,
10    he's the one that's been keeping me on the straight
11    and narrow trail.  And the look on his face, just
12    real respect and admiration, you can understand
13    what we can do if we promote community policing
14    done in the right way.
15              But it's not just community policing.  It
16    is also community justice.  It is troubling to see
17    a probation officer trying to work with a child not
18    knowing the police officer, not knowing the Judge
19    involved and nobody knowing the neighborhood where
20    the child is from.  If we concentrate our efforts
21    together, again, we can make such a difference.
22    But it's going to be how we solve the problem, not
23    how we create the problem or how we generate cases
24    for the courts.
25              But inevitability, the courts must come

                                                       22
 1    into play because there will always be children who
 2    violate the law.  There will always be children who
 3    must be held accountable.  And we must make sure
 4    that children understand there is a consequence for
 5    their action.  The Miami police officers would tell
 6    me again and again, these kids don't think anything
 7    is going to happen to them.  They think they're
 8    going to get a slap on the wrist.  I have heard of
 9    others now who use kids because they don't think
10    anything is going to happen to the kid and he does
11    the dirty work for them.
12              We've got to develop a system in our
13    juvenile justice arena where kids know there will
14    be a certain fair sanction that fits the crime and
15    that it will be imposed, that if they get into
16    trouble, there will be an ever increasing sanction
17    that fits the crime, that if they have problems
18    there will be a coherent plan of treatment
19    developed to address the issue that caused the
20    crime in the first place.  It makes no sense to
21    punish a kid who has a drug problem and not do
22    anything about the drug problem and let him go back
23    to the community.  He's going to be doing it all
24    over again.  But as lawyers, we have too often
25    stood by while all that has happened too often

                                                       23
 1    across the country.
 2              It has happened too often because the
 3    funding has been totally inadequate in so many
 4    instances for juvenile justice programs.  All of us
 5    as lawyers, all of us as people who care in our
 6    community must speak out to make sure that there is
 7    adequate, sufficient funding for our juvenile
 8    justice system so that it can truly have a chance
 9    at making a difference for our children.
10                The children must learn once and for
11    all that there is no excuse, no excuse whatsoever,
12    not where they came from or how they grew up for
13    putting a gun up beside somebody's head and hurting
14    them.  And there must be an appropriate sanction to
15    fit the crime.
16              But even if all of this works, what good
17    is it going to do if a child graudates from high
18    school and there is no job no matter what he or she
19    does?  We have got to make sure that in our job
20    training and placement programs we give the kids
21    skills that can enable them to participate in the
22    modern technology of today.  For those that have
23    not yet developed the skills, we've got to provide
24    entry level opportunities.  A job can oftentimes be
25    the best means of prevention.  But if we say to a

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 1    child, do everything right, and then
 2    you still can't get a job, that is defeating all
 3    the investment we make upfront.
 4              In short, the law in American society is
 5    not just a matter of written opinions, it's not
 6    just a matter of courtroom advocacy, it's not just
 7    a matter of who can write the best contract.  The
 8    law is the people of this country.  The law is an
 9    investment in people so that they can be
10    sufficiently strong to use the law themselves to
11    protect themselves.
12              We have much to do but perhaps one of the
13    places that those students who are here tonight can
14    look almost immediately for what they can do as to
15    their own family.  As you graduate from Canisius,
16    as you think about law school, as you go out and
17    start to raise your family, focus on that family.
18    Don't let work, don't let the legal profession,
19    don't let your valuable careers, whatever you
20    choose to do, overwhelm your family life.
21              When my mother wasn't working on the
22    house, she was teaching us to play baseball and to
23    appreciate Beethoven's symphony.  She was teaching
24    us how to play fair, she was punishing us when we
25    deserved it, she loved us with all of her heart.

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 1    There is no child care in the world that will ever
 2    be a substitute for what that lady was in our life.
 3              Now, I watch young parents struggle to
 4    get breakfast on the table, get the children off to
 5    school, both of them go to work, they struggle home
 6    through the rush hour traffic, get dinner on the
 7    table, the children bathed and homework done.
 8    Saturdays they run errands, Sundays they go to
 9    church and start all over again for the week to
10    come and they don't have quality time with their
11    children.  Again, each in our own family has got to
12    figure out how we can devise workplace and a family
13    setting that will permit both parents to spend
14    quality time with their children.
15              With telecommuting and modern technology,
16    job sharing opportunities, we should be demanding
17    the workplaces of America, the law firms of America
18    a workplace that puts the family first.  Now, some
19    people when I first mention this shy away from it
20    and say, how is that possible?  How can I maintain
21    my profits?  I think we're going to see workplaces
22    in America that put families first because families
23    are going to insist on it.  They are by far the
24    best caregiver.  And, surely, we as lawyers and as
25    people who care can structure the system that makes

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 1    sense.  Giving us the opportunity for professional
 2    development, for earning an income while at the
 3    same time giving our children the love and
 4    nurturing that they so sorely need.
 5              In these last months as I've talked about
 6    the problems and the violence, many people have
 7    said the problems seem so big and I don't know
 8    where to start.  But I have seen America work
 9    through other terrible situations.  In August of
10     '92 when Andrew hit and it was as if the world was
11    almost paralyzed for two or three days following
12    it, people walked around stunned and shocked
13    because their world had been turned upside down.
14    And then I watched people come together, start
15    directing traffic on their own, delivering water to
16    people who needed it, carrying clothes to other
17    people.  There was a bond and a unity of people
18    coming together to solve each others problems.  It
19    was almost miraculous and that community is almost
20    fully recovered now.
21              Then on April 19th of last year and the
22    Sunday that followed I went to Oklahoma City and I
23    watched the citizens of Oklahoma City, survivors,
24    victims, come together and speak out against the
25    violence that has fallen on them.  Joining with

                                                       27
 1    others help the survivors to begin to heal, work
 2    with law enforcement to see that the persons
 3    responsible were held accountable.
 4              Wherever I have gone across this nation,
 5    I see people who have helped.  Firefighters in
 6    Indianapolis, emergency room people in Arlington,
 7    Virginia, everyone coming forth to reach out and
 8    help and make a difference.
 9              We have a problem of youth violence and
10    youth in danger in this country that is of the same
11    dimension.  But with the spirit of the this nation,
12    the ability to solve problems and the can-do attitude
13    that made this nation great I know that we will
14    join together, uniting communities, bringing people
15    together from all this so that child by child,
16    family by family, school by school, block by block
17    neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, we take
18    back America for our children to begin.
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