RE: Clinton on Personal Freedom Abuse

["Ron Force" <rforce@moscow.com>]

A lot of Right-Wing sites quote this selectively.  Here's the entire
statement:

.. a lot of the Asian societies that are doing very well now have low crime
rates and high economic growth rates, partly because they have very coherent
societies with strong units where the unit is more important than the
individual, whether it's the family unit or the work unit or the community
unit.
My own view is that you can go to the extreme in either direction. And when
we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution
with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom
to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would
used it responsibly. That is, when we set up this country, abuse of people
by government was a big problem. So if you read the Constitution, it's
rooted in the desire to limit the ability of government's ability to mess
with you, because that was a huge problem. It can still be a huge problem.
But it assumed that people would basically be raised in coherent families,
in coherent communities, and they would work for the common good, as well as
for the individual welfare.

What's happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where
there's no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure.
And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's
too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to
move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend
on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps
and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities.
So that's my answer to you. We can have -- the more personal freedom a
society has, the more personal responsibility a society needs, and the more
strength you need out of your institutions -- family, community and work.

-- Bill Clinton, President of the United States, on MTV's "Enough Is
Enough."


********************************************
Ron Force	      	  rforce@moscow.com
Moscow Idaho USA
********************************************


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Hansen [mailto:thansen@moscow.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 5:55 AM
> To: John Harrell; vision2020
> Subject: RE: Clinton on Personal Freedom Abuse
>
>
> What's your point, Mr. Harrell?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Harrell [mailto:johnbharrell@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 9:31 PM
> To: vision2020
> Subject: Clinton on Personal Freedom Abuse
>
>
> "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical
> Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount
> of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans
> who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now]
> there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's
> too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to
> move to limit it."
>
>      -- Bill Clinton, 3-22-94, MTV's "Enough is Enough"
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
> http://sbc.yahoo.com
>