The Promise of Youth - Transcript

Well, now that you know everything about me except my shoe size, Good Morning. Thank you Director Nolan not only for your introduction, but for your leadership and for your stewardship in this great mission pursuant to your job. I told Commissioner Spence that the way you get an honorary doctorate degree is that you give a commencement speech and don't get paid. So I did that five times.

I am so happy to be in St. Louis. I knew that Director Nolan was a good administrator and a compassionate leader. I did not know she was a woman of such great faith. I found out when I leaned over to my friend from Parents Anonymous and said "What time does this session end?" And she said "10:30." It was then that I discovered that Director Nolan is a woman of great faith. You invite a black Baptist preacher to speak for about anything less than an hour, that's faith! But thank you for the information. It usually takes us about twenty minutes to get warmed up.

When I got here last night, I went to my room at the Adam's Mark Hotel. I've never been to an Adam's Mark Hotel before and the room is so big, I could hardly find the bed. And I thought to myself. "Well, how many people did they think were coming with me?" And so I thought to myself a room this big, conference table, two bathrooms, king size bed, I said my wife should be here. And just while I was contemplating that thought, I remembered what a friend of mine told me about a preacher whose wife went with him everywhere. He spoke every Conference, every church service, every graduation, every banquet, and after twenty years of a very successful marriage, he discovered that his wife kept this shoe box with a red ribbon tied around it in their bedroom closet and she would not disclose the contents. So he decided one day to take matters into his own hands. He looked inside the shoebox and he saw five round white eggs on top of hundreds of single dollar bills. So when his wife came home, he said "You know, we've had a wonderful marriage. You go everywhere that I go. You've been a wonderful spouse, but I can't figure out this shoebox with these eggs and dollar bills. Why would you have it? Furthermore, why wouldn't you tell me that it was there?" She said, "Well, twenty years of marriage I've been with you as you stayed every place. I've been to every graduation, every speech, every church service and frankly, I've heard everything you have to say. And for the last few years I decided that I had to make my being with you interesting to me. Since I've heard every story and every speech and every poem and every analogy and every statistic you know, I decided that would I would do while you were speaking was to give you a grade every time you opened your mouth. Well, if you did well I'd give you ten. If you did alright. I'd give you a five. But if you were so bad that people just went to sleep and left early, I'd not only give you a zero but I'd put an egg in the shoebox." He was so offended. He thought that there was a crisis in his marriage, but the he thought about it and said, "Well, after twenty years of marriage there are only five eggs in the shoebox. She's heard me thousands of times. That can't be all that bad. He said, "Why that's not so bad. How do you explain all those single dollar bills. She said, "Every time I get to a dozen eggs, I sell them for a dollar." (Audience laughter) So, not withstanding the size of my big room, I decided it's alright for my wife to stay home on some of these trips.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's 35 years ago today that an assassin thought it was a great idea to end the life of a 39 year-old preacher whose only crime was to dedicate his life to making America what America said it wanted to be. And so I am humbled by your willingness to allow me to share with you this important moment while there are still people in our country who have decided that it is noble and preferable to have as their life's work, the pursuit of happiness for other people. I'm somewhat amazed that all of you would leave your various places of work, traveled from near and far at a time of war, a time of great pain, a time of great risk to spend time in St. Louis discussing this very urgent subject. But your presence here indicates that you in fact understand that there is a greater war and that when we rid people afar from the tyranny of government abuse, we still have to address this issue of abuse right here at home. That if the world should be free of organized terror, the likes of which affected our nation on September 11th in an unprecedented way, we still have the constant truth that it is more dangerous for an American woman to go home, than it is for her to go any place else in this country. I am inspired, simply by the fact that you're here because you are the ones who work without stock options and golden parachute plans. You are the ones who work overtime but don't get paid overtime. You are the ones who often spend your own money buying supplies and taking children to McDonalds after hours while the bureaucracy attempts to catch up with where you are. You are the ones who do that knowing you'll never be reimbursed, but you'll keep the receipt anyhow. (Laughter/Applause) You are the people who take policies that have been crafted by people who have never done what you do, regulations that are written by bureaucrats, whose interest is protecting themselves from public scrutiny. You are the ones who are on the front line of the battlefield that will still be there when the war in the Middle East is resolved. (Applause) And so I'm honored to be with here with you because you are the hope of our nation.

When I got this invitation, I have to confess that I had mixed emotions about coming. When I was Secretary of State for New Jersey, I organized a brand new office in state government called the Center for Youth Policy and Programs and the primary objective of that center was to get people from the Health Department and the Education Department and the Attorney General's Office and the Governor's Office to sit down just once a month and ask the question, "How are we doing as a State for our children?" It was alarming to me that the Governor said to me, "Soaries, what can we do to make our State a better State?" By that time, our Governor had been responsible for leading a State that had created 200,000 new jobs. Our State was quickly catching up to Connecticut being a State where the highest median family income in America would be our mantra. Our State was growing. Atlantic City was booming. People were taking buses by the thousands, coming to New Jersey. It had become a destination state. Princeton University, constantly described as the nation's top Ivy League College. So many things about New Jersey. Ethnic diversity was just booming and the Governor was proud. The first female to be Governor of our State and she looked at me and she said, "But until our State becomes a State where every child can grow up in a healthy environment, then our State will not be a great State and I won't be a great Governor." Concurrent with all of these developments and simultaneous to all of these wonderful growth indicators of our State, we picked up the newspaper one day and found out that two teenagers ordered some pizza. When the pizza man came to the house, one of them pulled out a shotgun. When the pizza deliveryman came to the door, he opened the door and at point blank range killed him with a shotgun. When the prosecutors questioned him about why he ordered the pizza, he said, "I wasn't hungry. I wanted to see how it felt to kill somebody." That child learned that somewhere.

Two of our young people, boyfriend and girlfriend, graduated from one of the finest schools in New Jersey, came from one of the wealthiest communities in our State, went to college in Delaware together and decided that they would remain boyfriend and girlfriend in college. When they got there, one of the unintended consequences of their romance was a new baby. Well-educated, well-trained, wealthy parents from an upper class neighborhood, these children decide that the preferred method of resolving the unintended consequence that resulted in a baby was to check in to a motel, wrap the baby in a plastic bag and leave the baby in the garbage can. So New Jersey made headlines once again. And then a little fellow is canvassing his neighborhood to raise money for a school trip. He knocks on the door and a thirteen year old neighbor invited him upstairs under the guise of going to get money and nine year old Eddie Werner becomes a victim at the hands of a thirteen year old neighbor, who wraps a lamp cord around his neck and carries his body down the street to bury it in a shallow grave. And the Governor said to me, "We can't be a great State as long as our children are that disturbed." But children are generally not born predisposed to wrapping lamp cords around their friend's necks. And since I'm not a researcher, I don't have to give you data that you already know about the experiences children have that grow into the kind of behavior that I just described. But I said those things preceded by the statement that I had mixed emotions about coming here because in most instances when we gather like this, we talk about parent support and we talk about family support and we talk about what's happening inside the home and we look at the population of 21,000 perhaps in Massachusetts and 55,000 in New Jersey that are in what we call "The System" and it is the child in "The System" that we describe as being at risk or the child in the criminal justice system who we describe as being at risk, but my hesitancy in coming here is because I don't really fit in to that philosophy. My philosophy is that all American children are at risk. (Applause) And to be quite frank with you, I've come to conclude that America hates children.

My sons are thirteen, and when they're online or when they used to be online, I cancelled their email. They get these pop-up messages from people who are marketing to children. And I ask myself the question,"How do they know where my boys are?" We know our children and we have something to sell them. We understand children when we're attempting to connect them to the products we want them to buy, we know children so well, that whether they're black or brown, whether they're Asian or Latino, whether they're male or female, whether they're urban or suburban, we know exactly what our children like. We know exactly where our children go. We know what drives them. We know what motivates them. We know what attracts them. But it seems that in the public sector when we need to apply that knowledge to helping our children be healthy people and grow up in a safe environment, we get amnesia. (Applause) We know how to get our children to buy $85 video games. We know how to get our children to buy $190 tennis shoes. We know how to get our children to buy music that denigrates their mothers and their sisters and our daughters. We know how to get children to memorize words to songs that we can't decipher at all. We know how to attract our children to things that destroy them but as a society we still have not come to the conclusion that we should take all of that capacity and intellectual understanding of children and aim it at their health. We know how to sell children cigarettes, drugs, condoms. Your problem is, we can't figure out how to teach children by the time they're 9 years old that there's a preferred way to live that's free of violence and victimization and vandalism. It's an amazing thing to me. I say we hate our children because we'll pay an ignorant, illiterate athlete more money in one year than we'll pay you in your whole career. (Applause) And then we'll put them on the cover of Wheaties.

I went a meeting in New York once, Commissioner, sponsored by Fortune Magazine and the topic was "What can the private sector do to support public education?" And the top 100 corporations in the country were there, executives were there and I said, "Before I start, can I just give you an example of the kind of thing I'd like to see? I'd like to see on the cover of a box of Wheaties a picture of a teacher or the picture of a Mom or a picture of a law enforcement officer. Eat your Wheaties and be like your third grade teacher." They laughed so hard, they almost kicked me out of the room. It was inconceivable yet we say that the people who spend the time with our children are in fact the most important people in society yet they won't reward them the resources available in our society go to the people who we say are the most dangerous. I don't understand that. I don't understand how Congress can meet and see the need for special appropriations to fight wars abroad which I happen to agree with but not see the need to have special appropriations to fight wars right here which I also agree with. (Applause) I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old but I think we hate children.

We market violence through the media and then wonder why kids in school are afraid of bullies. We started our violence prevention campaign in New Jersey. It was based on a couple of premises. It was right after Columbine. I had talked to kids from Columbine and the kids told me that the kids knew that something bad was gonna happen. The principal didn't know, but the kids knew. So the assumption was, among adolescents at least, that if we were going to prevent violence, we had to involve the children in the solution. And we asked children to take a pledge to not only avoid violence but take responsibility to help lead violence prevention activities. But we wanted them to know that by violence we did not simply mean bringing a gun to school and shooting somebody because the average student in America is not afraid of someone shooting a gun. The average kid in American schools is more afraid of someone who will just push them around or say mean things. The average girl in New Jersey, when we talked to them, was not afraid of gun violence as much as they were date rape. And one of the reasons we have the clients that you have to serve, the Commissioner said it, is because of family violence. Family violence does not start when the husband loses his job. Family violence starts when that husband was sixteen years old , he was an athlete in school, he raped a girl, but it was socially acceptable and nobody said anything . That's when it started. (Applause). And as long as boys in America are taught by the culture and by media and by parents and by families and government that girls were really put on the planet to be their personal playthings to do with them what they want then that is violence and we'll always have family violence. We've got to start when our children are children. (Applause)

The other thing we assumed in our program that we called V Free, No Violence, No Victimization, No Vandalism, was that there was a relationship between the kids who vandalized the buildings and the kids who ended up in trouble with interpersonal relationships. And so we created this phone number. We created a 1-800 number that where statewide that any kid could call if the kid knew something bad was about to happen. I wish you could have been a part of those meetings where I had to fight with the Attorney General and fight with the Governor's office and fight with people just to give kids a phone number statewide that they could call if they knew that someone was going to do something to harm somebody else. I say we hate kids because our policies and our practices and our programs seem to undermine the very things that normal people know work. But I learned this long before I got to government. I've been in church. I'm a preacher. I learned a lot of this stuff in church. I was in Louisiana speaking to a large denomination and after my speech a fellow says, "Soaries, we bring young people from Russia to America and we take them on this two week cultural expeditions and we take them to Washington. We take them to different State Capitals. We take them to Wall Street and it occurred to us that everything we take them to is lacking a bit of diversity and we're religious people, you're a religious person. We'd like to know if you think there's some black churches in the country we can take them to." I thought to myself, "Okay, a busload of them Russian kids roll up to a black church on a Sunday morning. How would we do this right? They don't know the language. They've never seen black people before in their lives and we thought a good place to take them would be to a black church." So I said, "I'll get back to you." And it just so happened that my next stop was in Detroit where I was doing a seminar for the leaders of a group of black churches in Detroit and the subject was "How to get our kids back in church." These churches, they had great choirs, they had great activities but they had begun to notice that the kids were losing interest in church. And so when I got to the seminar, I said, "You know what, before we get into what I think you should consider in Detroit about getting kids back to church, let me ask you a question. A friend of mine in Louisiana is bringing some Russian kids over here and they'd like to visit a black church. Are any of you interested?" And they all raised their hands. "Yeah, bring them to our church." I said, "Really, what would you do with a group of Russian kids that showed up on Sunday morning at a black Baptist church? How would you prepare for them? What would your strategy be? And we spent about 45 minutes working through all of their responses. There was no hesitancy. They did no market research. They didn't even have a prayer meeting. They knew exactly what to do. First woman said, "I'd let my pastor know they were coming." I said. "That's a good idea." Another person said, "We'd have some young people from our church meet them at the curb and greet them when they get off the bus." That's a good idea. Someone else said, "We'd print our program in Russian, so that when they came inside, they could understand what we're doing in their own language." That's a great idea. One church said, "We could have reception before the service started." Another church said, "We'd have a reception after the service started." Somebody said, "We'd save seats for them so they wouldn't have to scramble with Miss Jones and Miss Smith." We went through 45 minutes of suggestions and at the end of that process I said, "You know what, you don't need a workshop because when you decide to do for your children exactly what you said you'd do for the Russian children, you'd get your children in church." (Applause)

Isn't it strange. They all knew what to do to deal with children from a different culture and they were confident that it would work. And so at our church, we had to do the same thing. We had to change what we call worship. At 11:00 we call it worship, that's for us, but at 1:00, we call it jam. That's for the kids. At 11:00, you see silk ties and designer suits and wide hats and high heels. At 1:00 you see blue jeans, and baggy t-shirts and boys with braids in their hair. My God, let us bow our heads in prayer. Braids in their hair! But they're in church and it's not the method but it's the message that matters. I know you've got issues to deal with that relate to specific policies and practices and philosophies in child welfare. But the big picture is this, if we love our children, then we will do whatever it takes to become a society and a culture that makes our children and nurtures our children and communicates with our children and transmits the great values that have made this country what it is to our children. If we love our children, then our institutions will modify their behavior for the purpose of reaching children. Listen, my daddy was a public school teacher. I love educators. I spent a lot of time traveling the country motivating teachers but there are some schools that drive me crazy. I had a principal at one school once tell me that a majority of the students in his school don't fit into the program. Change the program! (Applause) Change the model. Create teams. If the child welfare system is not working, then only a fool expects to get new results from the same practices. Develop your teams. Build more resources. Bring in the community.

We had a big problem in New Jersey some years ago where the State was being sued because of the border babies. Now I didn't know what a border baby was. I thought that a border baby was a baby born near the border. I'm a preacher. I don't know anything about border babies. And the Governor comes to me before I became Secretary of State and says, "We have a problem. We're being sued. We've got these children who are having children in the hospitals. They check themselves out, they leave and the babies are stuck in the hospital. And again, I have no clinical background. I have no expertise in these kinds of areas. And I look straight to the Governor and say, "Well what's wrong with that? The hospital's clean. You know, there's food in the hospital. There are people who work there." And then she began to explain to me what happens when a child stays in a hospital too long at birth. She began reminding me of how significant it was for my children, when they came home from the hospital to have somebody touch them in the morning, for them to smell bacon cooking in the kitchen and the predictable emotional and psychological defects of a child that is stuck in the hospital. She reminded me that the Office of Volunteerism reported to the Secretary of State which I became later and that office recruits people to go to the hospitals just to touch babies. She looked at me and she said, "We can't do it alone." And if there's any message I have for the people gathered here today is don't do it alone. Yes, you have cases and you have a legal responsibility in government. You have a client relationship in the private sector, but you can't do it alone. The State can't solve these problems alone. The State can take care of it's statutory obligations but you can't do it alone. You need Parents Anonymous. You need Hispanic organizations. You need the mosques and the temples and the churches. We need this partnership. That's why the President has tried to lift this model of partnership between faith-based organizations and the private sector. Not to dump responsibility anywhere, but to spread it around. The Governor said, "We can't do it alone," and I said, "Well, you know what. If what you're saying is you need more foster parents, I can help with that." Moses had a foster parent. Esther was raised by her Uncle Mordecai. The whole Book of Ruth is based on a relationship of an extended family, but Ruth was Naomi's daughter-in-law, not biological but she cared for her. Even Jesus had a foster dad. Joseph had nothing to do with his getting here. (Applause) Mohammed adopted a child that the great religious traditions of the world all include the notion of taking care of children who are not biologically yours. We can help with that. We can't do everything. We can't take over your duties, but we can help you with that and in four years we've recruited 185 families who have been certified by the State. We've taken in 285 children and adopted 45. One church! (Applause) Because it's not the State's job, it's our job. The thing that troubles me…the thing that troubles me about what the Commissioner said, he's right. When you fail, the world converges on you to kill you. But when you succeed, everybody takes credit. Everybody takes…"Oh, that's our child, you know." When you fail, your name is in the newspaper and your family is embarrassed and you can't get a new job but when you succeed in helping a 9-year-old hold on to his or her emotional capacity. When you succeed in placing a child in a family that's permanent, when you do a successful unification and in spite of all of that pathology, that something miraculous happens. That child goes on and graduates from college, graduates from this state of life, everybody takes credit. And so if you're going to watch a community take credit for the successes, then we have to demand that the whole community participate in the solution.

We have this V-Free campaign in New Jersey. I went and spoke to every high school and junior high school leader in the State. We asked them to take a pledge to participate and help us prevent violent acts. The acts of violence went down but it wasn't because of what I did, it was because of the partnerships. Let me tell you the most unique partnership that was created. We gave the kids little cards and they were called V-Free cards and it looked like a credit card. I learned this from my boys, kids love credit cards, so we created the V-Free credit card and on the front it had the 800 number to call if you know about something. On the back it had the pledge, we asked kids to sign it but we had to create some value because kids are smart. They caught on quick that this thing wasn't worth a dime. So I organized all the Pizza Huts, food of choice for children between twelve and eighteen. Pizza. And I said to the Pizza Hut owners, I said, "Listen, you know what, it would really help us. These kids are hearing anti-violence messages from the Governor. They're hearing anti-violence messages from the police, from the principals, from the parents, wouldn't it be great if they heard it when they ordered their pizza? And we organized a movement among Pizza Hut owners so that any kid who came to Pizza Hut and showed their V-Free card got a 15% discount on pizza. The Pizza Hut staff wore buttons that said "Ask me about V-Free." And what happened was every place kids went in certain communities, they saw this affirmation of an ethic and a value that we're all in this together. And if we are all in this together. If we are sending messages to parents and kids alike, in the schools and in the pulpits and in the restaurants and the beauty shops and the barber shops, then maybe we can impact this culture that seems to hate children and love children so that we prevent violence and abuse and neglect. I'm embarrassed to live in a country that knows so much about Mars, yet still seems to know so little about families. I'm embarrasses to live in communities where people are stuck, with no thought of being unstuck. As I travel the country, it's becoming quite alarming to me that we are fighting for the freedom of other people and not often enough wrestling with these great issues right here at home like you're doing at this Conference. And so my prayer is that you'll keep doing what you're doing because if you should fail, we will not be a place where every person can pursue happiness. But if you win, we will be the America that is in fact the envy of the world. And we will win more people over to our system by our outcomes than by our military strength. If you fail, generations yet unborn will grow into pathological behavior that they've learned from the culture, but if you win, we will be a nation where three generations from now people will look back on issues such as child abuse and domestic violence and on drug addiction the way I look back on segregation and slavery. (Applause) When I tell my boys that we didn't have VCRs when I was in school, they think that I went to school with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When I tell my sons that we had no cable television, we had no compact discs, they just think I'm as old as Abraham Lincoln. And when I tell them that we had colored water fountains, when I tell them that women could not vote, they can't believe it's the same America. And it's not. It's a new America because people have changed America. People have made a difference in America. People looked at the inadequacies and said, "Let's change our reality." My prayer is that when they talk to their children, tell them about some of the challenges of our generation, their children will look at them the way they look at me and say, "This can't be true. I can't imagine an America where women were the victims of domestic violence more frequently than any other problem. I can't imagine an America where families were in stress the way families are in stress today. I can't imagine an America that knew it had a drug problem and wouldn't fund drug treatment. I just can't imagine that America." It'll get there because of you. So, when things go wrong as they sometimes will, and the road you're traveling seems all uphill. When you funds are low but your debts are high, you want to smile but you have to sigh, when care is pressing you down a bit, rest if you must, but don't quit. God Bless You. (Applause)