The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

June 2, 2007
Cincinnati, Ohio

Thank you very much Don Murphy and Spencer Crew; First Lady Frances Strickland; Mayor Mallory; a longtime friend, John Pepper; the dinner chairs, Francie Hiltz and Carole Rigaud; and Rob Portman, who will follow me shortly to the microphone. Thank you for your service to our country. And John Hope Franklin, thank you so much for being here. Your very presence honors not only me, but every one of us, for America has no greater champion of freedom, no more eloquent chronicler of the history of freedom's fight.

I was looking at John up here, thinking that when I decided to ask him to head the President's Commission on Race, he was then already well past 80 years of age, and someone asked me if I thought he was up to it. I said that the question is whether we can keep up with him. The real reason I do all this work is not because I'm interested in public service. I'm following his example, because I want to look like that when I'm 92. God bless you. You are the greatest.

This has been a very special day in my life ending here at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I was delighted, when President, to sign the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act, co-sponsored by Rob Portman and former Congressman Lou Stokes from Cleveland, which provided funding for hundreds of Underground Railroad sites.

When we were in the White House, Hillary was interested in preserving America's treasures; some of them were Underground Railroad sites. And now we live in New York, the home of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and some of those sites. So this is very special to me.

But I began this day in another community, which was also a stop on the Underground Railroad, Galesburg, Illinois, home of Carl Sandburg, site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate. Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Douglas, in the fifth debate, spoke at Knox College, in the very place I was today, but when they tried to get outside, the door was blockaded, and they actually had to climb out the window to get to their debate. The first thing Lincoln said was, “Well, finally I can say I've been through college.” They gave him an honorary degree when he was running for President, hoping to boost his chances. They gave me an honorary degree when I couldn't run for anything. But they boosted my spirits.

I was thinking about the connection between the meaning of the Underground Railroad and America's long struggle for both individual liberty and national unity, to find harmony out of our many and increasingly diverse voices, and all the great challenges of the world today, including the ones that former President Bush and I were honored to address. The work we did in the tsunami and Katrina seemed to strike a responsive chord with America, I think in part because it was an affirmation of our underlying unity as Americans and our common humanity, both his and mine as former opponents and people who still have vigorous, sometimes downright hilarious political arguments. For me it was a great honor.

I saw George Bush a couple of days ago when we went to Charlotte, North Carolina to honor Billy Graham, who is 88 years old, at the opening of his library, and he asked me to tell you, personally, how sorry he was he couldn't be here tonight. He is a truly wonderful man, and I genuinely love him. It was a great honor for me to do all these things with him.

We had a lot of fun traveling around the world together, and I like it when he sort of makes fun of me, you know. He has a lot of things to make fun of. Bush is 82 years old, and he’s still jumping out of airplanes. I tore my leg up falling off a 10 inch step. The final curse of my life for defeating him in 1992 is that I now have to spend the rest of my born days being his straight man while he makes jokes.

He was the youngest pilot shot out of the air defending freedom in World War II. He gave more than 50 years of service to his country. He really doesn't have to do these things, and I am profoundly grateful that he did. These two endeavors in which we engaged were two of the most rewarding things I ever had the privilege of doing. It's different for me. I should be doing it, coming from the childhood I had, the rather modest circumstances into which I was born. I feel like the luckiest person in the world. There is no way I will ever be able to give back as much as was given to me.

But I want to make a larger point about this. Our little Katrina Fund raised $130 million, of which we have committed almost all of it to the states, to the institutions of higher education, to faith-based efforts to rebuild communities, and to community organizations. The involvement of the United States in helping people in the Katrina area and the effort we made in the tsunami were affirmations of the way the world needs to go.

We've got a lot of problems in this world. We have sustainability challenges in climate change and the depletion of all kinds of valuable resources just as the world's population is about to explode in all the areas that are already having the hardest time supporting people. It's a big problem.

We have the problem that our interdependence has given us shared vulnerability to terror and weapons of mass destruction. Just today another planned attack was thwarted at the Kennedy Airport.

We have the problem of sharing a world where we all know how we're doing, and it's a dramatically unequal world where half the world's people are not part of all the prosperity that brought us here tonight. They still live on less than two dollars a day.

One in four of all the deaths on earth this year will come from tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and infections related to dirty water: cholera, dysentery, diarrhea. Eighty percent of the kids who will die in that last category are under five years of age. No one you know will die of that in America.

One hundred and thirty million children never go to school. In our country, after all this recovery, we still have had a four percent increase in the number of people working full-time falling below the poverty line and an increasing number of people working full-time losing their health insurance.

It's an unequal world, largely because of all these new forces and how they're working to reward some and burden others. And do we have to deal with them? Yes. But can we deal with them all? Absolutely, if, but only if, we do something that George Bush and I tried to do in our efforts with the Katrina Fund and the Tsunami Fund. That is to realize that our differences are important and interesting and aid the search for truth. Since no one has the complete truth, if we didn't differ with one another, we'd never make any progress. But progress is only possible when, out of all that difference, we find a fundamental underlying unity. That's what “E Pluribus Unum” means.

That is the great question today facing all of humanity, for all the problems we have are as nothing compared to the challenge of putting ourselves in the right frame of mind and heart to deal with them.

It all revolves around a very simple question, the same question that got humanity in trouble over slavery and kept us in trouble as Americans in the aftermath of slavery, when we tried to cling to whatever little discrimination we could for as long as we could. Part of our human nature is the need to believe that our differences matter most. But we cannot prevail in the world in which we live and the one that we want our grandchildren to inherit unless we believe our common humanity matters more.

Consider this: when the tsunami hit South Asia, Americans sustained relatively few of the quarter of a million deaths, but we gave $1.2 billion. The average contribution was about $276, but the median contribution, the one in the middle, was under $60. Thirty percent of America's households gave, including many people who before the tsunami could never have identified Sri Lanka or Maldives on a map. But they were moved by the simple human tragedy with which any sensate person could identify.

Half of the contributions given by Americans were given over the Internet, which is an enormous change in the modern world and has an incredible empowering effect. It means that you don't have to be able to afford to come to a dinner like this to change the world if there are enough people just like you who think just as you do. In 2004, for the first time since our campaigns became so horrendously expensive, contributions to both major political parties among small donors in total were greater than the contributions of big donors because of the Internet.

When George Bush and I started raising money for the Katrina Fund, I took my annual trip to the New York State Fair with Hillary. It's about the only place where a guy from Arkansas is any good as a senator's spouse in New York. But I'm very good at the New York State Fair. I mean, I know one end of a cow from the other, I understand crop cycles and stuff, so I go, and I like it.

But anyway, it was just a month after George and I had been asked by the President to raise money for the Katrina. I was walking down the midway past all those booths where you throw things at targets and win stuffed animals. I had my little nephew with me, and he was trying to figure out what he wanted to throw at. A woman came running out from one of these booths in a khaki shirt with a logo on it, and she stuffed 50 bucks in my hand and said, “This is for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. I'm sorry to give it to you in cash, but as you can see, I'm working. I don't have time to send it over the Internet.” Now, this lady is not some dot-com millionaire. How much money could she be making working in the fair booth in Syracuse? And already, her preferred way of giving is over the Internet.

This gives all of us the chance to band together as never before to deal with our common challenges. All we have to do is recognize that they are our common challenges. Who did Americans help after the tsunami? Well, they helped mostly Buddhists in Thailand, mostly Hindus in India. In the Maldives, they helped mostly Muslims. In Sri Lanka, they helped Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese who have been fighting like crazy for the last 30 years in a civil conflict in which 60,000 have perished, twice as many as have died in the violence between the parties within the Middle East. It’s the bloodiest civil conflict anywhere on earth for the last three decades. When I went up there to meet with them, we met in the play yard of a Catholic school, because the small Christian community was trusted by both sides to bring them together. In Indonesia, we helped the biggest Muslim country in the world.

In that moment of our common humanity, the United States won its greatest military victory in a Muslim country, with the exception of getting rid of the awful Taliban and running the al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. Before the tsunami, America's approval rating in Indonesia, which is 98 percent Muslim, was 30 percent. After the tsunami, America's approval rating soared to 60 percent. Meanwhile, Mr. bin Laden's dropped from 58 to 28 percent. He hadn't done anything to them, but neither did he do anything for them. People's lives were destroyed by the millions, and in a stunning moment of recognition, everybody knew somehow there was a common humanity, and that it's far more important to build than to tear down.

The children, in their grief therapy sessions in Indonesia, were drawing pictures of American military helicopters dropping food and medicine and lifelines. Our government representatives were there helping people with clean water. Business people from all over America just showed up with water purification equipment. Religious and non-religious non-governmental groups were there. We were all there simply reaffirming our common humanity. That was the wave that George Bush and I rode doing the work we were doing.

We got so excited that we wound up working for two more years for the United Nations on disasters. I took over as the U.N. coordinator for the tsunami; he did the same thing in Pakistan after the earthquake.

I went back to Indonesia about a year later, and I had an experience which I hope will make the point I wish to make. I had to go to one of these settlements. People were still living in those tents. It was just like in the Katrina area. The hardest thing when a lot of people have been wiped out in a natural disaster is fixing the housing quickly enough. There's almost no way to do that. So we still had thousands of people living in these tent cities, and each one had elected a leader as their representative.

When I took the tour, listened to the people's concerns and complaints, and tried to figure out how to fix them, I was introduced to a man who was the leader of one of these tent cities. We were accompanied by his wife, their son, and a beautiful young woman who had been an Indonesian television personality. She was my guide and interpreter. When I looked at this little boy, I literally almost couldn't breathe, because he was so beautiful. I don't know that I've ever seen a more beautiful child in my life. In this hot, steamy, muggy camp where people were sweating under old canvas tents, there was this radiant child.

So I said to the young woman with me, “You know, I believe that's the most beautiful child I ever saw in my life.” And she responded, “Yes, he's very beautiful, and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters, and they're all gone.” But there was that man and his wife with a smile on their faces, talking not about their grief, but about the needs of the people they were representing.

So we go through the tour, see all the stuff, and hear about the problems. The last stop was the health clinic, where they were doing all kinds of things. I'm going to get in trouble with every husband and wife of childbearing age when I tell you this, but in their culture, when a woman has a baby, she doesn't have to do anything for 40 days. She goes to bed and stays there. And her husband and her extended family and everybody else waits on her hand and foot for 40 days. She can't get up. And then after 40 days, she gets up and they name the kid.

So they brought me the newest-born baby. I looked up, and there was this woman who had lost nine of her own children holding the newest-born baby in the camp, less than a week old. She had a smile on her face. She said, “This is our newest baby, and we want you to name him.” Through the interpreter, I said, “Well, is there an Indonesian word that means new beginning?” So she told the lady, and the mother said to me, “Yes, luckily for you, the word Dawn is a boy's name in our language, not a girl's. We will call this child Dawn, and he will symbolize our new beginning.” I tell you that because we shouldn't have to bury children to identify with one another.

The world is awash today in political and religious, almost psychological extremism, because some people need to believe their differences are more important than our common humanity. After all, how could terrorists kill innocent civilians and treat them as legitimate targets unless they were somehow or other lesser beings than them?

But when the human genome was sequenced, it actually reaffirmed the finest of religious teachings. When they studied the 3 billion genomes in the human body, it turned out we are all 99.9 percent the same. If you look around this room, every difference you see in skin color, hair color, eye color, height, width, you name it, it's all due to one-tenth of one percent of our genetic makeup.

I was in New York the other night having dinner with friends, and I saw Rush Limbaugh. I wanted to go up and tell him we were 99.9 percent the same. I didn't, because I was afraid he would run away screaming and yelling in grief, so I just shook his hand.

On the other hand, next month I'm going to take my annual trek to South Africa to celebrate Nelson Mandela's 89th birthday with him. I've made it three of the last four years, and I can't believe that I'm 99.9 percent the same as him because I hold him in such awe.

Now, a lot of our creativity comes out of that one-tenth of one percent. But so does a lot of our ego and a lot of our narrow-mindedness. Almost everybody in this room spends over 90 percent of our time thinking about the one-tenth of one percent of us that's different from everybody else. We don't take very much time at all to think about the 99.9 percent that's the same until something like the tsunami comes along. Why should George Bush and I have to wait for a disaster to fess up to the fact that we've always really liked each other?

Think about it. All that science basically confirms religion. The Torah says that he who turns aside a stranger might as well turn aside from the most high God. The Koran says Allah put different people on the earth not that they might despise one another, but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another. The Christian New Testament says the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, but the second is, "like unto it to love your neighbor as yourself." And the Dhammapada of the Buddha says that you're not really fully human unless you can feel the arrow piercing another person's skin as if it were in your own body.

Lo and behold, we finally sequence the human genome and find out that they were all right all along. And yet here we are, stepping on our children and grandchildren’s futures every day by repeating in modern terms the error that led to the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Amendments, and the long struggle for equal opportunity in America. We forget that there is nothing we cannot do if we relish and respect and glory in our differences, but maintain a fundamental regard for our common humanity.

I'm profoundly indebted to the President for giving me a chance to work with his dad and remember and learn all that all over again. It's meant more to me than I can say. I don't really think I'm entitled to an award for it, but I'm honored to receive it, because I honor what the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center does.

I just ask you to think about that tomorrow or the next day. I've been thinking about Africa a lot lately because my Foundation does a lot of work there on economics and AIDS. We've got 750,000 people in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and all over the world on AIDS medicine now. We'll have 100,000 kids getting medicine by the end of this year, kids that would have died otherwise.

I know to a virtual certainty that most of those children will never even have a clue as to who I am, and it doesn't make a bit of difference to me. I just don't want any child to die before his or her time or be denied the right to live their dreams. And I think it's important to remember this lesson, not just on banquet nights and not just when we're giving people trophies and not just when somebody has lost nine of their ten kids, but before we feel that we have to do something that we know better than to do.

Nelson Mandela is the freest person I ever met. He was in prison for 27 years, but he did not break. As he has said, at some point after being filled with hatred for 11 of those years, he realized that they could abuse him physically and mentally, they could kill him if they wish, they already robbed him of the right to see his children grow up, they had separated him from his wife, and it would ultimately lead to the end of his marriage. But he realized that they could take everything except, in his words, “my mind and my heart. Those things I would have to give them, and I decided not to give them away.”

In little countless ways, most of us give some of our mind and heart away every day under the psychological or intellectual impulse to believe that our differences are more important than our common humanity. True freedom is knowing better than that.

In Mandela's tribal language, Xhosa, there is a word which the youth service project for black and white South Africans we started together uses as their motto: “Ubuntu.” It means in English, “I am because you are.” In any social setting, there is really no way for me to exist as a totally isolated being. Therefore, I must have some regard for you, no matter how much I disagree with what you do or how different our opinions are.

A couple hundred miles north of there, in another place I work, when people meet each other walking on trails, they'll say “Hello, how are you, good morning,” in their native language, and the response is not what we would say: “I'm fine, how are you?” The response, translated into English, is “I see you.” Think about that. There is no way to give a person greater dignity than to see him or her just as they are, and as they are just like you.

In the end, that's what the struggle for freedom in America is all about. We never struggled to be free so that we could be divided. We struggled to be free because equality was required for us to be one out of many. That is now the challenge that faces us in an interdependent world. It is the most important thing of all. More important than any specific position on climate change, terror, or anything else is whether we are capable of living with the absolute conviction that as wonderful as our differences are, our common humanity matters more.

Thank you very much.