Remarks at the
Dedication of the C.J. and
The President. Thank
you Governor Orr; Senator Karnes; Congresswoman Smith; Dr. Reeves; Mr. Mayor,
Hal Smith; and thank you, Bob Gray. Bob invited me here, and he
certainly is a persuasive fellow. I bet he could even talk Sam Donaldson into
attending charm school. [Laughter] But I was happy to be persuaded. It's no
secret that I like this area of our country, and though as President I can't
really favor any one football team, I'd just like to say there's no place like
Nebraska.
But
I'm delighted and honored to be here to dedicate the C.J. and
But
another Gray, the British poet Thomas Gray, who died in 1771 -- I know what
you're thinking, but, no, I never met him -- [laughter] -- he wrote beautifully
of the small towns of England, whose people lived, as he put it, ``far from the
madding crowd.'' ``Along the cool sequestered vale of life,'' Gray wrote,
``they kept the noiseless tenor of their way.''
Well,
he was talking about the kinds of people who don't make a lot of noise, whose
lives aren't flashy or gaudy, God-loving, God-fearing
people who believe in certain fundamental principles, principles like
self-reliance, taking care of your own and your community, looking within
yourself for strength and looking to God for your bearings. Those bedrock
principles are at work all around this town, this campus, even this very
communications center. I'm told that
But
this center also serves a special purpose as we come to the close of the 20th
century. It will truly be a window on the world, an exhilarating and
fast-changing world. In our day we've seen an explosion of communications
technology unlike any humanity has ever known. It wasn't all that long ago that
a man named
Well,
not today. A
And
take the astonishing story of two writers living 340 miles apart, Stephen King
and Peter Straub, who collaborated on a novel called ``The Talisman.'' They
hardly ever saw each other while they wrote. Instead, they read and edited and
went over every sentence by zapping chapters from one computer to another over
telephone lines. Words and sentences and paragraphs were converted into
electrical impulses for their journey through the telephone. The phone lines
turned the electrical impulses into light pulses. And these light pulses were
turned into electromagnetic signals, which were beamed 22,000 miles into space
to a satellite. The signals were then relayed back to Earth, again converted
into light pulses, then changed back into electrical impulses to go through
another set of phone lines, until finally those impulses arrived in the memory
of the second computer. And thus, in seconds, words composed in
Breathtaking,
isn't it? And it took nothing more at each end than two computers, two modems,
and two telephones. That same technology, modified
some and with more bells and whistles, may make it possible for students at
Yes,
the communications revolution will allow those who by choice live far from the
madding crowd to participate fully in the blessings that living with the
madding crowd has traditionally conferred, blessings such as access to organs
of culture and the ability to choose among the wide variety of professional and
social options once reserved for city dwellers. The center is already receiving
newscasts daily from countries as varied as
And
all of this is merely a prelude to a future in which shopping and jobs and
education and culture will come to our doors and into our homes, courtesy of
the technology that we see here today. Access to these bounties will be
possible for the people of
And
now it's my pleasure to be the first person to say: ``Radio station KFKX is on
the air.''
Thank
you, God bless you.
Note: The President
spoke at