1999 UTAH STATE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION

Speech by Governor Michael O. Leavitt

The past few months have been difficult for America. On the heels of impeachment came a war in Kosovo, Chinese espionage and a national nightmare of kids killing kids.

We mourn the lost lives, search our souls and react to the disaster of the moment. And inevitably with the shock and regret comes the question: What's wrong with America?

It is times like these that we need a reminder about what is right with America. What this nation means to us. What it was made of and what it must always stand for. What it represents to those who see it only from afar and in their dreams.

In the history of mankind, there has never been a nation as admired, as willing and as capable of inspiring and fulfilling hope. A shining city on a hill, Ronald Reagan called it.

My gratitude for this country was renewed recently when I met Tito, a young Ethiopian man. To understand his story I need to take you back to 1974.

Ethiopian military factions aided by the Soviet Union toppled the regime of Haile Selassie and touched off a long period of war and unrest. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed and displaced. Tito was two years old at the time of the coup.

Most of what he experienced was upheaval and destruction as seen through the eyes of a child. One day, the family's life was normal -- his father headed off to his job as a police chief; his mother minding the home. The next day, the life he knew was over.

His father was arrested and never seen again. His mother spent three months in jail. When she got out, she gathered up her children and fled to another part of the country, where they tried to sustain themselves. Before too long, the war -- and a famine -- caught up to them.

Tito tells of helicopters coming in the middle of the night to level entire towns. People fled all over again -- this time as refugees to Sudan.

The march to Sudan took about nine days. People dropped dead along the way from starvation and exhaustion. Tito told me one of his greatest sorrows was seeing his little cousin die and leaving him under a tree, because there was no one with the strength to bury him.

Forty-thousand people arrived at the Sudanese refugee camp in a matter of days. Tito quickly got lost in the disarray of a head count. He would remain lost from his mother and siblings for the next two years.

He was alone in the world at 8. Think of your eight year old son or grandson. He was alone. Death was all around him. Every day a test of survival. For those two years, he never stopped searching faces on the chance one might be his mother. It never was.

Then a miracle happened. Tito's brother, happened into Tito's part of the camp. Someone noticed the identical names. Tito jumped into his arms. There was a flood of tears. The little brother had been found, alive.

It was a four day walk to his mother, and Tito ran most of the way. He did not see the face of a refugee. He saw radiance and love. For days following their reunion, he did not leave her side.

I asked Tito if he ever gave up. Was there a point, I asked, when you expected to die? He told me of an instance when Sudanese soldiers threw him into a river and whipped him with wet leather straps until his back was like flank steak, then put him for several days into an earthen pit filled with ants that covered his body. He said, " I remember thinking, if I can get through this, I can survive anything."

Going to America was the dream of every refugee. The brother that found Tito died trying. He walked to Kenya on the rumor that it was a better chance for passage to our shores. It took a year and a half. And it was in a Kenyan refugee camp that he died.

Several years past. Another refugee march, more hardship. Then, another miracle. In 1993 Catholic Charities brought Tito to America. First stop, Baltimore. He was alone, didn't speak the language, but Tito was driven by a sense of new opportunity. He found work cleaning fish on the docks, sending part of every dollar he made back to his mother and sisters.

Within two years Tito had saved enough money to move to Utah. When he got here, the friend who invited him here had moved. Once again, he was alone.

Beginning at 5:30 every morning, Tito went door-to-door downtown looking for work. He found a job, first at a car wash, and later as a dining room server at the Marriott Hotel. Always he sent money back to family in Africa.

As he worked, he absorbed – the language, the words on the menu, ways of conversing. He asked customers to help him, co-workers, even strangers on the bus, and they always did. He was always talking – about weather, about anything, he says – so that he could learn from it.

And learn he did. I knew, he said, I had to go to school. One day he walked into Salt Lake Community College and registered. A boy who had not more than three months of schooling in his lifetime entered college and began pursuing a degree.

Working 50 hours a week, every spare minute was devoted to study. Hour after hour he would study, working to make up for the disadvantages of having never been to a formal school in his life.

A math teacher gave him confidence that he was smart. An English teacher told him he could write. Suddenly chemistry just made sense.

I met Tito two months ago. He still talks a blue streak and works 50-hour weeks. But now those jobs are at LDS Hospital and the University of Utah, where he is a teaching assistant in the chemistry department.

Now the refugee boy is a husband, a father, a citizen of the United States and of Utah. He is closing in on a four-year degree at the university, and this fall he will apply to medical school.

It is an almost incomprehensible march -- from the dust of Sudan to a physician in the making. It is a triumph of human spirit and the country that exalts it.

I asked Tito what America meant to him, and there is still disbelief in his voice. He told me the land of his birth chased him out and tried to destroy him. That he came to a place where he was different in every way and people gave him the same chances they give their own children."

He says he would sit in a classroom and was not looked down on as someone from a land that had nothing. No one said go back. You can't find a place like that anywhere, he says.

He says he will teach his children all that life has taught him. Look at what he teaches us – about the values of gratitude, persistence, hard work and individual responsibility. About the dignity of each human life, the blessings of a stable government, the power of education.

These are the traits that have made America great in generations past. These are the traits that must be present for generations to come if American greatness is to continue. This story reveals the hope and unlimited opportunity that are America. Because if they are available to a refugee who came halfway around the world with nothing, they are available to any and all. Especially to those providence allowed to be born here.

A light burns more brilliantly here than anywhere else because we are the New World -- a land discovered, fought for and destined forever to be free. The only nation that started from scratch as a democracy and has never known any other way.

It is time to remind ourselves of how much we have -- and to resolve that the light will never be allowed to fade.

So as a Republican, I say let us be the party that takes America's highest aspirations to heart with a vision that upholds and honors them. Let us be the party that remembers we are a superpower. That our strength is compounded by compassion, and with prosperity comes generosity.

Let us be the party that glorifies the flag in the name of the many who gave their lives defending it. Let us teach our younger generations to appreciate what they have – and to give something back.

Remember what Republicans stand for. Limited government. Responsible spending. Tax fairness. Safer streets and schools. An education system second to no other. A strong national defense. The sanctity of life. The moral courage to boldly delineate right from wrong. A belief in God declared with no apologies.

Let us remember all of this and the bright prospects we face at the dawn of a new century.

In Utah, Republicans have much to cheer. Unemployment is at 3%. Taxes have been reduced 29 times – more than one billion dollars in six years; 250,000 new jobs have been created; people are making more money.

We are rebuilding roads and improving schools. Thousands of Utahns who previously had no health care now have it. The air is cleaner. Technology is leading us to a new century that will be like no other.

We will have challenges but Republican leadership will tackle them. I would like to mention two briefly. Our state legislature is currently considering ways to make our neighborhoods, streets and school safer. We have been jolted by a series of incidents that have made us feel insecure.

We are the party that stands for the 2nd Amendment. Americans must have the right to keep and bear arms. But let us also be the party that acknowledges reality: Blind people cannot drive. The seriously mentally ill cannot have guns.

Likewise, a person committing a violent crime with a gun must be punished. Part of that punishment is a forfeiture of the right to have a gun.

And let me say that this is one Republican parent that doesn't want to send my children to a school that is protected simply by arming the teachers.

On the national front, the era of infamy is almost over. We are going to have a new president in 2000 -- a Republican president.

We are going to have Supreme Court vacancies, which means a chance to move this country further along the path of federal-state balance and respect for human life.

We will have stature back in the White House, which means we can act like a nation that remembers who we are and what we stand for.

We get the government we demand. And if we are sick and tired of leaders who court the entertainment industry while deploring its violence ... a system that says we can have guns in schools but not prayer ... a liberal mindset that says, "If it feels good do it, because government owes you no matter what your choice was ..."

If we are sick and tired of this ... If we decide our expectations have been lowered enough, then we can change it. This is America . And we are its keepers.

At his citizenship hearing, Tito's hands shook and he still harbored a fear that someday someone would say, "go back, we don't want you." But then the oath was administered and he heard the words, "one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all." Tito was an American, and he was afraid no more.