The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [174]
What creature comforts are you going to miss the most about leaving the White House—about not living there?
What I will miss the most is not the creature comforts. It’s the honor of living in the White House, which I have loved. And, even more than that, I’ll miss the work. It’s the job I’ll miss the most—I actually love doing this job.
Do you just get off every single day when you get up?
Every day. Even on the worst day. Even in the worst times of that whole impeachment thing. I just thank God every day I can go to work.
What have you learned about the American people? You’ve had a unique exposure to them that nobody else has ever had.
I’ll tell you this: When I leave office on January 20th, I will leave even more idealistic than I was the day I took the oath of office, eight years earlier.
The American people are fundamentally good, and they almost always get it right, if they have enough time and enough information. But the biggest problem we have in public discourse today is, there’s plenty of information out there, but you don’t know what’s true and what’s not, and it’s hard to access it. It’s all kind of flying at you at once. It’s hard to have time to digest it. But if people have the information, they have time to digest it, they nearly always get it right. And if that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be around here after 224 years.
Do you have any special message to young people? Any valedictory thoughts to the kids in school right now as you leave office?
This is a fascinating time to be alive, but it’s not free of challenges. So I would say to the young people: You’ll probably live in the most prosperous, interesting time in human history. But there are a lot of big challenges out there, and you’ll have to be public citizens as well as private people.
THE DALAI LAMA
by Robert Thurman
May 24, 2001
Right now, the gap between rich and poor is increasing more and more. At least five hundred new billionaires have come up during the last twenty years.
Five hundred!
Yes, up from twelve in 1982, and now almost six hundred. But out of those, more than one hundred have come up in Asia. Though we think of Asia as poor, there are billionaires in Asia, and at the same time so many poor people in the West—so it’s more like a worldwide system of rich and poor that has gone beyond East and West. You have said that the communists failed miserably in their attempt to force the rich people to share.
Yes.
So then what is the alternative in trying to get a better balance?
People have to decide on their own that it is good to share what they have, at least to some degree. I think that this can only happen through education, through increasing their awareness. In the long run, when there is one rich family surrounded by poor people, mentally they will not be happy. Their children will always receive some harassment from the poor community, so physically also they will constantly feel some sort of fear or threat. So in the long run, not only will they be morally unhappy but also they will be practically unhappy.
Then, you can think in terms of the murder rate or senseless violence in the community; in some cases an overly polarized economy can become one cause of a civil war. When there is too much of a gap, some agitators can easily organize the poor people, as they can claim to be fighting for equality or for justice. So therefore, if we return to an ever more huge gap, then due to such conditions within societies, many troubles are bound to come. That being the case, in the long run it is in the interest of the richer people themselves to make sure that there is a less-extreme gap between themselves and the poor around them. In this way, they will realize their enlightened self-interest in sharing.
Then also they can think more carefully about their own lifestyle. For example, except for the fact that richer people can think, “I am really