Millennium Network Event

July 31, 2007
New York, NY

Thank you very much. I want you to know why we did this. I think it’s really important that people like you have a chance to build a more united world. It isn’t just something that people like me and Bill Gates do. Everybody in the world has a chance to be a global citizen in some way and should be given that opportunity.

Just about all of you here -- just about every other person in the world-- are younger than me. And as I think about the world that you will have, those of you who have more tomorrows than yesterdays, it’s a really fascinating place. I mean, look around this room tonight. This is a really interesting crowd. You know, if we had a crowd like this 30 years ago, it would be a lot smaller, and basically it would a bunch of white guys in suits. Now at least half the crowd is women, we have people from every conceivable continent and race and religion, and it’s an interesting crowd, right?

This is the best of tomorrow in this room tonight. Lots of different stories. People doing lots of different things for a living. But there’s another world out there with three huge problems that I try to deal with: first of all, it’s a profoundly unequal world. Half the world’s people live on less than $2 a day; 130 million kids never go to school; one in four of all the people who die this year on earth will die of AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water. In our own country, median wages are flat. Half the people are not benefiting from the global economy. We have an epidemic of childhood obesity. We have what we used to call adult onset diabetes, type 2 diabetes, the kind you’re not born with, showing up in a 9 year old child in Harlem last year. We’ve got it coming into kids everywhere in America, unequally falling on people of color and low income people without regard to their race and threatening this generation of children with being the first not to live longer lives than their parents. It is an unequal world.

Secondly, it is an unstable world in ways that we identify with terror, but basically the root of it is that there are too many people who wouldn’t feel comfortable in a crowd like this because they believe our differences are more important than our common humanity.

And the third big problem we’ve got is that it’s an unsustainable world because we’re burning up the planet, because of global warming, and the destruction of vital resources. So what I try to do is to bring people together to do what they can to deal with those problems.

We have a climate change initiative that’s working in 40 cities on five continents to reduce greenhouse emissions in a way that puts people to work. Take New York City. The mayor introduces his climate change program, and all discussion’s on the congestion fee. And if you have to pay it every day and you’re a middle class person, you hate it. And if you’re like me and you’ve got too much money and the President gave you a tax cut for five straight years, you’d pay $80 a car to keep from waiting another hour in New York City traffic. But what you need to know is that’s only 20 percent of the problem. Eighty percent of the problem is buildings. And just think, if we decided to replace every light bulb, every bad window, green all the roofs, put up the solar panels, do all the things we could do, it would create 100,000 jobs in New York City alone just to green the buildings in the next three years. People need to start thinking about our future as a common future where we get rid of inequality, we reach out across the lines that divide us, and we save the planet. So that’s what I’m trying to do everywhere.

We treat three quarters of a million people who have AIDS now with our medicine. We’re now working on malaria in Tanzania. We’re helping to find jobs for people who don’t have them in two African countries, and we’ll soon be working all over the world wherever there’s mining to try to help people build environmentally responsible futures.

But the main thing is the idea that every life is as important as every other one and our common humanity is more important than our differences. Do you know what the Human Genome Project showed? Look around this room. We are all genetically 99.9 percent the same. And if you think we’re hardwired for aggression and hatred and division, all the latest brain science shows that even though our basic neural networks are formed by age three, we are capable of learning well into our 60s and 70s.

The world doesn’t have to be the way it is. It can be otherwise if we imagine it and work for it. So I thought that we ought to have something like this Millennium Network to give young people the chance to buy into this future that I want you to have, and I’m very grateful to you for being here tonight. And I hope that you will think about tomorrow, when you go about your business, what you can do for the rest of your lives in terms of time or money to deal with these three problems: you don’t wan to burn the planet up, you don’t want to let our differences be more important than our common humanity, and we can’t tolerate the level of inequality that exists in education, health, and income in this country and around the world.

We can do something about it. All of us. We can all do something about it. So that’s why we’re here, and that’s what your money will go for. And I’ll try to spend it well. I’m a bleeding heart cheapskate. I will try to make sure that every one of you can know in good conscience when you put your head on the pillow tonight that you helped to save a child’s life or give a child a different future or build a world that has more friends and fewer enemies.

Thank you.