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4 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS OF
5 ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO
6 AT BOSTON COLLEGE
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21 Monday, May 19, 1997
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23 Boston College
24 Conte Forum
25 Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
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1 (10:35 a.m.)
2 ATTORNEY GENERAL RENO: Thank
3 you, Father Neenan, Father Lahey, thank you for
4 inviting me here today, your eminence, honored
5 guests, and mostly to the graduates. I
6 congratulate you, each one of you, for what you
7 have accomplished at this very great
8 university. I'm very, very honored to share
9 this time with you and with your families.
10 I have had an opportunity to
11 meet students this morning who impressed me
12 with their realism, but touched me by their
13 idealism. They represent what this great
14 university is all about: service and reaching
15 across lines to come together to serve all of
16 human kind.
17 From this wonderful institution
18 you will draw strength and wisdom,
19 understanding and faith that will be with you
20 all the days of your life. Lessons learned
21 here will guide you in success and failure and
22 joy and sorrow. You need them, for the world
23 will change before your very eyes.
24 I think back to this day 37
25 years ago when I graduated from college. I
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1 never dreamed I would see all that I have seen
2 and done all that I have done.
3 The challenges you and the
4 world will face will test all that you have
5 learned here. But there will be wonderful
6 opportunities to put to work the great
7 knowledge that you have gained here and the
8 great understanding.
9 Now having talked with some of
10 your colleagues this morning, this may not be
11 so. But in case some of you may turn from the
12 challenges of these next years saying, I'm just
13 going to throw up my hands; the problems of the
14 world are too complicated; it's too big; no one
15 person can make a difference; I'm not even
16 going to try; I'm not even going to get
17 involved -- let me just tell you this: Each
18 one of us can make a difference.
19 For four years now I have
20 traveled across this country and seen senior
21 partners in a law firm who tutor a young child
22 at risk. I've seen senior citizens work in a
23 parent patrol to ensure the safety of their
24 neighborhood. I've seen a homemaker with seven
25 children still volunteer for duties outside the
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1 home. Every one of us can make a difference.
2 How do we do it? We don't let
3 the bigness of the world overwhelm us. We take
4 it one step at a time. Say what you believe is
5 right and then stick with it. If you know
6 you're right, don't let polls or criticism turn
7 you away. When you lose or when you err, know
8 that that happens, pick yourself up, dust
9 yourself off and move ahead. Don't be afraid
10 to try.
11 I learned a valuable lesson. I
12 ran for office in 1972. I tried to do and say
13 what I believed to be right. I lost the
14 election. But as someone told me, just keep on
15 doing and saying what you believe to be right.
16 If you wake up the next morning, you'll feel
17 good about yourself. But if you pussy foot,
18 equivocate, and talk out of both sides of your
19 mouth and say what you think is popular, you'll
20 wake up the next morning feeling miserable.
21 Well, I didn't feel very good
22 the next morning because I had lost the
23 election, but then somebody put a biography of
24 Abraham Lincoln on my bedside table. It was
25 wonderful to learn that Lincoln lost his first
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1 election. It helps to know how to lose and to
2 know it's not the end of the world.
3 Learn to do things the right
4 way and learn never to be intimidated by the
5 complexity of it.
6 When I was eight years old, we
7 lived in a little wooden house. We had four
8 children in the family a year apart. We were
9 outgrowing the house. My father did not have
10 money enough to hire a contractor to build the
11 house.
12 One day mother announced she
13 was going to build a house. And we said, What
14 do you know about building a house? She said,
15 I'm going to learn. She went to the brick
16 mason. She went to the electrician. She went
17 to the plumber. She talked to them about how
18 to build a house.
19 She came home and over the next
20 two years she dug the foundation with her own
21 hands with a pick and shovel, laid the block,
22 put in the wiring and plumbing. My father
23 would help her with the beams when he came home
24 from work at night.
25 She and I lived in that house
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1 just before she died, just before I came to
2 Washington. And that house was a symbol to me
3 that you can do anything you really want to if
4 you work hard enough at it and if it's the
5 right thing to do.
6 But that house taught me
7 another lesson. In August of 1992, Hurricane
8 Andrew hit our neighborhood. About three
9 o'clock in the morning, winds began to howl, an
10 unearthly noise unlike anything I've ever
11 heard. Trees began to crack around the house.
12 My mother got out. She was very
13 old and frail. She sat in her chair, folded
14 her hands, and she was totally unafraid, for
15 she knew how she had build that house. She
16 build it the right way. She put in good
17 materials. She didn't cut corners.
18 When we went out after the
19 hurricane had passed, all the surrounding area
20 looked like a World War I battlefield, but the
21 house had only lost a shingle and some screens.
22 Build your life the right way
23 and don't be intimidated by the complexity, but
24 don't forget to laugh at yourself and don't
25 forget to have fun.
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1 I made a promise to myself the
2 day I graduated from law school that I would
3 never do anything that I didn't enjoy doing.
4 There have been some days that I can perhaps do
5 without, but most mornings I wake up with an
6 eagerness to go to work, to do the best I can.
7 I hope the same for you.
8 What advice can I give you? I
9 think the Jesuits give the best advice in their
10 commitment to serve others. Figure out what
11 you can do for the rest of your life to serve
12 others.
13 It may be the bank president
14 who runs the most user-friendly, thoughtful,
15 confident banking service available for the
16 people he serves, but that bank president can
17 also tutor a child at risk.
18 It may be an insurance salesman
19 who remembers a coach of his little league team
20 and goes out and coaches three days a week to
21 make sure that kids have opportunities.
22 It may be an 84-year-old man,
23 such as one I met, who stood up one day and
24 said, Do you know what I do three mornings a
25 week for three hours each morning? And I said,
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1 No, sir. And he said, You know how old I am?
2 I said, No. He said, I'm 84 and I volunteer as
3 a teacher's aide in the first grade class. And
4 the teacher stood up and she said, He
5 volunteers for my class. The gifted kids can't
6 wait for their time with him because he
7 broadens their horizons far beyond what I can
8 do. And the kids with learning disabilities
9 think he has the patience of Job.
10 Whether you're eight or 84,
11 every single one of us can make a difference.
12 You can do work in your church. You can
13 develop pro bono programs in your law firm. As
14 you go looking for jobs, find out just what
15 they do to permit public service, community
16 service, and participate.
17 But then there is public
18 service: service to your country, service to
19 the state, service to the cities. Some people
20 say, Well, government doesn't work very well;
21 it seems too contentious.
22 These last four years have been
23 the most wonderful opportunity that anybody
24 could have to serve. Yes, it is true that you
25 get cussed at, fussed at, and figuratively
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1 beaten around the ears very regularly. But
2 there is nothing more rewarding than public
3 service.
4 Last year I went with the
5 President to South Carolina to dedicate a new
6 church that had been built in the place of a
7 church that had been burned in the rash of
8 church arsons. It was a moving moment. But as
9 we finished, a lady broke through the lines,
10 ran up to me and gave me a big hug and said,
11 Janet, I haven't seen you since Miami when you
12 were state attorney and you used to get my
13 child support. And she said, And these are the
14 two guys you got me child support for. And two
15 grown, young men smiled down at me. You
16 remember those moments as long as you remember
17 anything.
18 You remember the victim coming
19 up to you ten years later and saying, You
20 prosecuted my case. You helped me. You helped
21 make me whole again. There is nothing more
22 rewarding than public service.
23 And even the man who stopped me
24 and said, Thank you. And I said, For what? He
25 said, For arresting me and getting me into drug
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1 treatment. He said, You believed in me, and
2 you got me into treatment. I've been clean for
3 two years. I've got my family back. I've got
4 a job back. That's what public service is all
5 about.
6 Sometimes you will fail. But
7 if you move ahead, figuring out how you can use
8 the law and government to serve the people in
9 this great democracy, you may not make much
10 money, but the rewards are far greater than any
11 dollar can ever provide you.
12 As you deal in the concept of
13 service, I urge you to focus on community.
14 Even if you go to Washington, never forget the
15 community in which you live or from where you
16 came, because too many communities of this
17 nation have become afraid and unraveled.
18 It is up to all of us to
19 re-weave the fabric of community around our
20 children, around the elderly, around neighbors
21 who for too long have not talked with each
22 other. We need to bring new skills to this,
23 problem-solving skills.
24 Instead of wringing our hands
25 and saying, We can't do anything about crime in
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1 this community, we've got to reach out and
2 figure out how we work together to solve the
3 problem of crime.
4 We've got to learn how to
5 communicate with each other and listen to each
6 other. We must make sure that we don't let
7 disagreement on one issue close the doors to
8 good dialogue on all the other issues that
9 beset us.
10 And we need to learn how to
11 resolve our conflicts without harsh words and
12 help our children resolve their conflicts
13 without knives and guns and fists.
14 Most importantly to the idea of
15 community and re-weaving the fabric of
16 community around our families and our
17 neighborhoods comes the idea of professions
18 working together.
19 I had an incredible seven
20 minutes about an hour ago talking to the dean
21 of the nursing school and the educational
22 school and the college of arts and sciences.
23 What this great university has
24 done in terms of getting professions to come
25 together to address mutual problems together
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1 serves as an example for all of this country.
2 And as you leave here, take the Boston College
3 example with you.
4 When you return to your
5 community or go on a new assignment or to a new
6 community, find the nurses, find the
7 universities, find the police, find the
8 teachers who are working together and reinforce
9 what they do. It can make such an incredible
10 difference. And as you do that, you can work
11 together in problem solving.
12 One of the biggest problems is
13 people don't want to get involved in their
14 communities because they don't want to come
15 outside. They don't trust people because they
16 don't feel safe. But working with community
17 policing, community probation, you can make a
18 safer community.
19 Public health specialists can
20 come together with prosecutors and public
21 defenders and police officers in addressing the
22 problem how we treat drug abuse, how we deal
23 with the problem of domestic violence, how we
24 provide for prevention programs that work.
25 We must address the problem of
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1 violence in the home together. For too long
2 this nation swept that problem under the rug.
3 But unless we end violence in the home, we will
4 never end it in the streets and in the schools.
5 Another community problem may
6 exist in schools. You may come to a community
7 and the teachers will say, Our class sizes are
8 too huge. We don't have enough computers. We
9 don't have enough teachers who know how to use
10 computers. Whatever we're going to do will
11 cost money.
12 Galvanize your business, work
13 together lobbying the legislature, work with
14 the city council and the school board, but
15 never give up trying to give our youngsters an
16 opportunity to grow.
17 As you build community, if you
18 don't like what's happening in city hall, don't
19 say, Those are just the politicians. Go down
20 there and do something about it. Go down there
21 and contribute and make a difference.
22 But as you focus on community,
23 the number one issue I think you must address
24 in America is how people put children, all of
25 the children of America first in our lives.
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1 We see the problem of youth
2 violence and youth victims. We see drug abuse
3 rising with our children. We see the problem
4 of drop-outs.
5 And I, as a prosecutor in Miami,
6 had an investigation of a 17 year old that I
7 had adjudicated guilty of armed robbery and see
8 four points along the way in that child's life
9 were we could have intervened and made a
10 difference and kept him away from crime.
11 We've got to make an investment
12 early on, because the doctors who took me to
13 the public hospital in Miami to try to figure
14 out what to do about crack involved infants and
15 their mothers, they taught me that the first
16 three years of life was the most important.
17 This was the time you learned the concept of
18 reward and punishment and developed a
19 conscience. Fifty percent of all learned human
20 response was learned in the first year of life.
21 Well, you may think, That's not
22 my problem. But unless we make an investment
23 beginning at the beginning, we will never be
24 able to build enough presence 18 years from now
25 if a child does not understand what punishment
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1 means or has a conscience.
2 Unless we make an investment in
3 children now, the greatest nursing and medical
4 institutions in the world will be brought to
5 their knees because we failed to provide this
6 kind of care up-front.
7 Unless we make an investment in
8 children at zero to three, the educational
9 institutions of this land will be spending
10 money on costly remedial programs that they
11 could be spending on preparing our students for
12 the 21st century.
13 All of us, every American,
14 whether out of common humanity or in their
15 self-interest has an interest in making sure
16 that every child in America has preventive
17 medical care; that every child in America has
18 safe, constructive child care from zero to
19 five; that every child in America has an
20 education to prepare them for the 21st century;
21 and every child in America has supervision and
22 care during those afternoon and evening hours
23 that are so critical and so important; and that
24 every child in America has somebody who can
25 mentor them, look up to them, and take care of
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1 them.
2 But as you proceed with
3 service, do not forget those most dear to you,
4 closest to you: Your own children.
5 I remember my afternoons and
6 evenings after school when my mother wasn't
7 building the house. If she were building the
8 house, she took us with her and we helped. If
9 she wasn't, she taught us to play baseball.
10 She punished us and she loved us with all her
11 heart and soul. And there is no child care in
12 the world that could ever be a substitute for
13 what that lady was in our life.
14 Your challenge and my challenge
15 is to somehow or another put children, all of
16 the children of America, first in the work
17 place, so that we can have time to spend with
18 our children, so that we have time to read to
19 them at night, so that we have time to
20 participate with them in school activities.
21 How do we do it? We use the
22 wonders of modern technology to ensure that
23 time, through telecommuting, through altered
24 shifts, with parents' shifts dovetailed school
25 shifts.
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1 We can do so much if we realize
2 that if we make this investment in children, we
3 can only help ourselves, our businesses, and
4 this world.
5 So, as you leave this great
6 institution, ask your employers what they're
7 going to do to put children first in the work
8 place.
9 But as we look at communities
10 and as we look at children, we need to look to
11 a new dimension. We have come to a time when
12 scientists, priests, lawyers, and businessmen
13 must come together as never before to try to
14 understand how we use the tools of science God
15 has seen fit to put in our hands to uplift
16 mankind, to increase our knowledge, to increase
17 our opportunities, to increase our freedom and
18 to give us vistas and new worlds while
19 recognizing the risk that new technology
20 brings.
21 The Internet can give us
22 extraordinary opportunity to communicate and to
23 learn. But we must do that without letting it
24 be a vehicle of instant hate to thousands of
25 people around the world or a vehicle for those
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1 who would convey obscenity around the world.
2 How we reaffirm our
3 constitution while at the same time doing that
4 is going to be something that scientists,
5 lawyers, priests, and everyone must come
6 together and understand.
7 In biology and chemistry we see
8 new opportunities for long lives and better
9 health, but we also see new risks that we must
10 come together and understand. And scientists
11 must help us understand these tools.
12 There are too many of us that
13 are not truly literate in that wonderful world
14 of computer ease. And how we understand it so
15 that we can use it as a tool rather than
16 letting it be our master will be one of our big
17 challenges.
18 The scientists have sometimes
19 got to think about dollars, too. Instead of
20 just building one machine a year that gets
21 better and better each year so that the other
22 one becomes obsolete, we have got to figure out
23 how to use all our machines in a cost effective
24 way.
25 But as we address these issues,
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1 as we come together to serve, we have something
2 else to do. We have to do all that we can to
3 heal the divisions caused by intolerance and
4 bigotry, to heal the youth who is angry, to
5 welcome the immigrants, and to control the
6 racial divide. We need to speak out against
7 prejudice and hate everywhere we find it.
8 Haters are cowards. And when
9 confronted, they usually back down. But too
10 often we let them become entrenched before we
11 speak out because we're too busy, we don't want
12 to get involved, it's not our problem. Hate
13 and the turmoil it causes is everybody's
14 problem in America. We must do more to reach
15 out to each other before hate and bigotry can
16 begin to come between us.
17 Too often we live in our
18 insular worlds with each other enforcing our
19 own voluntary racial separation. We pass each
20 other on the streets or in the shopping mall,
21 but we don't connect as individuals.
22 With this separation we risk a
23 lack of understanding of the views and the
24 perspectives of others. We risk not learning
25 of the wonderful racial, ethnic, and cultural
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1 traditions that have made this nation so
2 strong. We must build on the great diversity
3 of this wonderful land.
4 There is another threat to
5 tolerance and understanding in this country,
6 and this is the growing development of
7 anti-immigrant sentiments. There is a tendency
8 to find in new arrivals a new opportunity for
9 scapegoating.
10 One of my first childhood
11 memories is of my father describing his arrival
12 to the United States from Denmark when he was
13 only twelve. He spoke only in Danish, not one
14 word of English. People teased him about his
15 funny clothes and funny language. He never
16 forgot that. But four years later, he was the
17 editor of the high school newspaper, writing
18 beautiful English. And he went on to become a
19 reporter for the Miami Herald for 43 years. He
20 always made clear to me that this nation had
21 done so much for him and his children and that
22 we must always honor this nation's tradition as
23 a nation of immigrants.
24 We cannot let demagoguery carry
25 the day. While immigration is a complex and
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1 compelling area of public policy, we must not
2 let the public debate be ruled by divisiveness
3 and fear.
4 Our immigration policy is not
5 about fear from those from other countries. It
6 is not about the color of someone's skin or the
7 native tongue or cultural tradition or
8 accumulated wealth of others. It is about
9 upholding the rule of all in a fair, respectful
10 way.
11 America is an ever changing
12 place. We must continue to be a society that
13 celebrates her differences while embracing our
14 unique ethnic identity.
15 We cannot permit the
16 narrow-minded to deny that we are a
17 multi-cultural society, as we have always been.
18 Every person is diminished when
19 any one of us on account of color or accent or
20 where we were born experiences anything less
21 than the full measure of his or her dignity and
22 privilege as a human being.
23 So, as you leave this great
24 university today, I wish you Godspeed. I wish
25 for you that you take the commitment of the
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1 Jesuits to service with you all the days of
2 your life. I hope you will leave here resolved
3 to use what you have learned here in the right
4 way, to make a difference in this world, to
5 serve and to protect all of the people, and to
6 never ever give up trying to secure peace,
7 liberty, and justice for all. May God go with
8 you.
9 (Applause)
10 (Whereupon, at 10:48 a.m., the
11 speech concluded)
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