CGI 2025 | What's Next — President Clinton opening remarks

Thank you very much. Thank you for being here, and welcome to CGI. We've got a busy two days ahead of us, but before we begin, I think it would be irresponsible, almost jarring, for us to take off and not acknowledge the traumatic rise in political violence that we have seen in our country in recent months. So I'm worried about it, and I want to say just a few words about it and how it affects what we're doing here. I'm worried because we're pulling further and further away from one another. You hear people very disturbed about what happened to Mr. Kirk and his family. I am too. Then, not long before that, we lost a former Speaker of the House in Minnesota and her husband and one of her colleagues. What I can't get over is, if you go back through, all the way back to, let's say, Charleston, the Mother Emanuel Church, there seems to be too much difference in the people who are grieving. I think this is the product of our disagreements in America becoming so deep that people are desperate not only to win elections against those they disagree with, but to actually dominate them at any cost. In a democratic republic, that poisons politics and puts the entire experiment that we've been working on for 250 years at risk. I'm worried about America dismantling so suddenly and without advanced planning, domestic and foreign assistance programs. I'm worried about the war on science and public health, the assaults on higher education, the banning of books in the military academies, the proliferation of costly trade wars, the fracturing of alliances and international institutions that have served the world for decades, the elimination of asylum and resettlement programs, the trampling of due process. I'm worried about all these things, and I'm worried about the idea that public service is in danger of becoming a new profit center. I'm worried that we're at risk of losing our freedom of speech, and that the weight of the government is being used to restrict expression from journalism to comedy. Look, no politician likes the press on bad days. Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between a government and a free press, he would without hesitation choose to keep the free press and lose the government. Every time somebody tells me that story, I remind them that he said that before he became president. But the president's supposed to be tough on us. Facing hard questions and being forced to think them through and answer them makes our ideas stronger and our politics better. And if the coverage is unfair and inaccurate, we can stand up and do that and point it out and express our disagreements without trying to put people who are doing their jobs under the Constitution out of business. That's wrong. And you don't build strong societies by doing this. It's an illusion. It causes societies to fail when their institutions are all discredited. So I think we all have to acknowledge that vigorous debate and disagreements and dissent are necessary, healthy in a functioning democracy. But violence, intimidation, and repression are not. We got to be clearly all on the same side for the first and against the latter. And we start by practicing seeing each other as people again, both in person and online. You know, once you start dehumanizing people, once we take three-dimensional people and turn them into two-dimensional cartoons, it's hard to come back from that. It's easy to tear somebody down and hard to go build them back up. And it's bad for all of us. So of all the outcomes that emerge from this meeting, I hope above all else we will model a better way forward. We will prove that we're open to different viewpoints, that we respect our differences, and that we're working together for better tomorrows. I know our work this year won't be easy. I know there's been so many controversies that have divided America so much, and also other parts of the world. I'm aware that many of you here and the organizations you represent are contending with tough times and conflicting pressures. And so more than anything else right now, I just want to thank you for facing the obstacles and making the brave decision not to give in to fear, to come here and do something about it. We started CGI 20 years ago because all the evidence I had seen across a lifetime, both in public office and as a private citizen working with the foundation, proved to me beyond any question that cooperation works better than conflict. That diverse groups actually time and again have been proved to make better decisions than homogenous groups or lone geniuses. That positive-sum systems where everybody has a chance to win, beat zero-sum competition in terms of building strong countries, strong communities, strong societies. Thanks to you and all your predecessors, the last 20 years have worked out better than I ever dreamed. Over the last 20 years, more than 500 million people in more than 190 countries have been positively affected by people keeping their CGI commitments. So we're here to keep moving forward and to keep looking forward. Don't forget next year, if you're an American, is our nation's 250th birthday. And our long journey toward a more perfect union, everybody knows we've been far from perfect. And I, for one, do not believe we need to rewrite the history of the country to remove our imperfections. It makes recognizing what you've done wrong or how you've grown out of an old habit is a strengthening, invigorating experience. Pretending that you were always perfect is deadening and it's exhausting. Remember the great insect biologist E.O. Wilson, who died in his early 90s a couple years ago, said that our species on Earth has survived because, along with ants, termites, and bees, we're the best cooperators. And unlike them, we have both a conscience and a consciousness. And it is our conscience that every time we move to the breaking point of a society, every time we come to a brink and almost fall off the deep end, our conscience is kicked in and has made us the longest lasting, continuous democracy in human history. Not because we were perfect, but because we weren't. But the alarm went off and got us back in line. And the alarm reminds us that as mad as we get at one another, what we have in common is more important than what divides us. That there is no challenge that we can't overcome if we work together and that every single one of us has a role to play. For 20 years here at CGI, a big part of that role has been to fill the gap between what the public sector can provide and what the private sector can produce. We've done that by creating networks of cooperation where different individuals and organizations bring their distinct perspectives and expertise and come up with new ideas or better on-the-ground implementation of those ideas or interesting ways to generate funding to make them reality. CGI is basically a big, often incredible, network of cooperation. And by being here, you're showing up for one another and for countless millions of people outside this room. Look, I'm not naive about the scope of the challenges we face, but we have to decide every single day whether we're just going to scream into the wind or scream behind closed doors or roll up our sleeves and get to work doing what we can. You're living proof that the latter choice is far better if you want to make a real difference in your own life and the lives of your fellow humans. We're trying to do everything we can to provide a counterweight to a lot of the negative things that have taken place in the last several months. And this year's meeting, as a lot of you have already found out by the morning sessions, will look and feel different than the ones we've held before because the whole thing is organized around our working group model to provide more room for honest, real person-to-person conversations. Around all these big challenges and to give every one of you the opportunity to come together to embrace solutions, forge coalitions, and make plans to fill the new gaps created over the last few months, as well as the gaps that were there before. The theme of the meeting is what's next. The truth is Hillary, Chelsea, and I don't know and neither do you. And we should be grateful for that. We shouldn't be ashamed to say we don't know where all this is going to play out, but we know what side we're on. We know what we're going to try to do to make the most of every day. And we know that the CGI community is particularly well suited to step up to meet the pressing needs that are already manifest here and around the world. I have lived long enough to know that disillusionment is a decision in advance to be disappointed. And that is a mistake. And so here's what I think. If we hold our heads high, keep our eyes and ears open, and deal with others with an outstretched hand and not a clenched fist, we got a chance to keep hope alive. We have a chance to make a meaningful difference in many people's lives here and around the world. So I urge you to keep that in mind. If you do, there's a good chance this could be our best CGI meeting yet, and our future depends on it. Thank you, and God bless you.