Assembly Bill
864
Relating to: recodification of fish and game laws.
By
Joint Legislative Council.
To committee on Rules.
Senate Bill
96
Relating to: homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle and providing a penalty.
By
Senators
Huelsman, Rosenzweig, Buettner, Darling, Drzewiecki, Weeden and Welch; cosponsored by Representatives Otte, Urban, Duff, Black, Ladwig, Carpenter, Olsen, Goetsch, Wasserman, Kreibich, Green, Seratti, Schafer, Harsdorf, Robson and Plale.
To committee on Judiciary.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
Senate Bill
492
Relating to: the powers of full-time court commissioners.
By
Senator
Burke
; cosponsored by Representative Walker
.
To committee on Rules.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
Senate Bill
520
Relating to: disciplinary procedures for certain local law enforcement officers.
By
Senators
Welch, Burke, Huelsman, Fitzgerald, Jauch and Grobschmidt; cosponsored by Representatives Klusman, Dobyns, Green, Johnsrud, Musser, Turner, Porter, Jeskewitz, Travis, Gronemus, Hanson, Kreibich and J. Lehman, by request of Professional Police Association of Wisconsin.
To committee on Urban and Local Affairs.
Referred on March 26, 1998.
__________________
ENROLLED BILLS
The following Assembly proposals, which have been approved by both the Assembly and Senate, have been enrolled by the Legislative Reference Bureau:
Assembly Bill 951
Assembly Bill 952
Charles R. Sanders
Assembly Chief Clerk
__________________
Communications
State of Wisconsin
Revisor of Statutes Bureau
Madison
A778
DATE: April 1, 1998
TO: Charles Sanders
Assembly Chief Clerk
Donald J. Schneider
Senate Chief Clerk
FROM: Gary L. Poulson
Deputy Revisor of Statutes
SUBJECT: Rules published in the March 31, 1998,
Wisconsin Administrative
Register, No. 507.
The following rules have been published:
__________________
Pursuant to the unanimous consent request made by Representative Carpenter on Wednesday, March 25, 1998 (Page 746 of the Assembly Journal), the remarks made by Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers to the members of the Assembly follow:
"Thank you very much. Let me tell you first of all, it's an honor to be in your presence. I always love the opportunity to talk. I remember when I was in high school I was kind of shy, but now you can't get me to shut up when I get up to talk.
I just want to thank Carol Kelso and Scott Jensen who invited me here to give me an opportunity to share with you and just to share some of our dreams and our concerns for our nation.
And I've been often asked by people, are you going to become a politician and my response is no, and I've also been often asked will you become a pastor of a church and my response is no. You know, I want to be what God wants me to be. If whatever he calls me up to, that's the area I'll go into.
It's just interesting to me to see the things that are happening around myself and my family and my wife and really what we feel are the areas that God is really moving us into.
I'm the type of person who has realized a long time ago that it takes a compassion to really deal with people. I remember a while back when I was in Philadelphia I was pretty much instructed to start taking the ministry to the streets, and I remember when God spoke to me about it I pretty much told him he was crazy and there was no way that I was going back to the streets. And the reason I said that is because I know my wife is rather hardheaded. She is going to go wherever her husband goes and I knew that she was going to make me take my kids, too.
I remember in the process of really understanding it and really going, I read a scripture in the Bible. And the scripture said that we overcome the enemy by the of blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony and by not caring for our lives even unto death. And that's the part that really hit me, the last part, not caring for my life even unto death.
I realized that I cared about Reggie White too much. I cared about the things that were surrounding him. I cared about more of what Reggie White has and more of what Reggie White was than I did about my fellow man, and because of that challenge we started doing street ministry. We went into the streets.
And I'll never forget the times we were doing it. We went to two old ladies' houses. We asked to use their electricity because we had speakers, and both of the old ladies, I'll never forget, they asked the question, what are you doing down here? We said, well, we feel like we've been called down here, and both of them said, man, we've been praying for something like this.
And I remember going into the communities and just talking to the people and preaching to them and did it for two years, and after that two years I realized something. People are tired of being preached to.
And in the process of realizing that I realized that in the process of being in the streets, as I left I felt a void, and I realized what that void was. And that void was that, yeah, we went in and talked to them and tried to encourage them and tried to influence them but we met no needs. We didn't create jobs. We didn't help the young girl that was pregnant through her problems. We didn't help the drug addict get off drugs or the drug dealers to stop dealing. We didn't help anyone.
We just went in with a message that really had no credence to it, and from the process of that I began to realize that there had to be opportunities that were created, and those opportunities created as a minister I wouldn't have to go in and preach because the people would come in to us and our message would be able to get over to them the way we wanted to by helping to meet their needs.
I realized really in reading the Bible, that really before Jesus told anybody who he was he met their needs first. He cared about them first and he tried to understand them and tried to get them to understand him by his love for them, and I began to realize that you can not help people if you don't care about people, if you don't have a compassion for them.
In the process of that we created Urban Hope. With Urban Hope -- the name before was Alpha and Omega, but we changed it to Urban Hope this past year. Carol Kelso, John Underwood, Peter Platten, who are on our board with the Green Bay Packers, really took this thing by the arm and really went out and promoted it for us to help us to get it started in Green Bay.
A779
We wanted to start it in Milwaukee first, but the problem was there were so many turf issues there we figured we'd start in the smaller city and try to get it up off the ground and get it proven and probably can get it working much quicker in a smaller city than we probably could in a bigger city and then move it around.
Well, we started in Green Bay. Some of you may have heard, we've created a microcomputer program, an entrepreneur school and a housing initiative, and the community came together to do this, from the businessman to the government. The whole community came together to do it together.
And I believe that in order for anything to work in any city, that turf issues have to be destroyed, because it's not going to take one person to change a city, it's going to take everybody to change a city. And to deal with the problems that we're dealing with in our cities today, maybe spreading across this country, we're dealing with some major problems, you know, we're trying to find solutions to.
And I believe that we're searching for those solutions in the wrong places, and we're depending more on our education to correct those solutions instead of depending more on God to correct those solutions.
In the process, we've just had our first entrepreneur graduation. We graduated 13 people. The two students that had the best business plans ended up getting a $2,500 grant apiece, and we're actually helping them also to be able to go to the banks and also get a loan to even build their businesses even stronger.
And from that our goal for Urban Hope is to teach responsibility, to make people responsible. People in our cities have been given so much free money lately that they're not toting the responsibility, and that money goes. It's only temporary. We have to make it lasting. We have to teach responsibility.
In the process of teaching responsibility we have to build families. Because the thing that is destroying inner city communities today is that the families have been destroyed and torn down.
You have a majority, and particularly in the black community, a majority of young people's fathers are either in jail or dead, and that's a problem. It's a problem when in our corrective facilities in America, that 40 percent of the men in jail in the total population, including women, are black men.
So we have a problem in our community, and the problem is we don't have enough fathers in our community. In the process of not having enough fathers in our community, we're not being able to train our children in the aspects that they're supposed to be trained in.
One thing I really admire about the Jewish community is that when they give their sons bar mitzvah when they're at the age of 13, they give their daughters bat mitzvah at the age of 13, they're celebrating their man and womanhood. They're telling them, that look, you're a man now. Because you're a man, you're going to have to become responsible. You're a woman now. Because you're a woman now, you have to become responsible.
In our inner city communities we have no situations to when we can celebrate young children's manhood or womanhood, and because we don't do that and we haven't done that and been able to do that, our children are running rampant. They think what it takes to be a man is maybe how many guns they got inside their jackets or how many young ladies they get pregnant or even how many young ladies get pregnant. They.
Think now that that's what it takes to be a man or woman. We're not training them to let them know what a true man or a true woman is, and a true man and a true woman is responsible.
In the process of that and having an opportunity to go to Israel, I was really impressed with some of the things that I saw over there. One thing that I was impressed with, to look back in the past and see how these people built their cities. I realized something about us as Americans. We're lazy. We're extremely lazy.
The reason I say that is because when we were to Megiddo, they built cities on top of cities. They built seven cities on top of one another, and everything was made out of rock -- not brick, rock. And they had to carve the rock and they had huge stones that they had to lift to build the cities.
But the reason they built the cities was not for the purpose of really putting money in their pockets. They built their cities for the purpose of protecting their people from the enemy. That was -- as we were in Megiddo we went down into the ground. Actually, the women used to go out and get the water for the communities, but when they went out the enemy was waiting.
So what they did is they took a hammer and a chisel and they dug through rock 140 feet through a tunnel, made a tunnel so that the women could go get water so that they would be protected, but they dug through rock 140 feet with a hammer and a chisel for the purpose of making sure that the people in their communities were taken care of.
Today in our nation we're not protecting one another. We don't have compassion for one another. It seems as though we as Americans are doing more to get on top and stay on top than trying to help the man down at the bottom to at least live some type of decent life. And until we as Americans learn to have extreme compassion for our people, this country will never move into the direction that we need it to.
And I know many people I talked to outside some of these communities tell me a lot, we don't know what to do. There are many churches that say that they don't know what to do, and I believe that. But there are many people that don't care what happens in these communities. There are many people that would rather incarcerate our children than to educate our children.
A780
I have a problem with the correctional facilities. I have a major problem, because the correctional facilities around America make between 30 and 40 billion dollars a year. It's a business. The only way to keep that business going, we have to incarcerate. Less than 10 percent of the crimes in America are violent crimes. Other crimes in our neighborhoods are because of drugs, because of guns and many crimes are because of traffic tickets.
We talked to a lot of young kids down in Milwaukee. One kid went to pay off his traffic tickets. He got arrested on the spot. He had the money to pay for his traffic ticket, but he was arrested right on the spot. We've helped many kids. We've helped and talked to many young kids who have been incarcerated, and many of them have been incarcerated in some respects because of their surroundings.
I always ask myself this question, and I think it's a question that all of us need to ask each other. When it comes to drugs and when it comes to guns and when it comes to illegal activities that are going on in our communities, you have to ask yourself a question. Where is it coming from? It's not coming from these inner cities. These kids and these people in these communities don't have enough money to be distributing these drugs, to be distributing the guns into these communities.
When are we as people going to wake up and realize that crime is coming outside of the communities, and because the crime is coming outside the communities, we ask ourselves another question. Why would these young people deal drugs? Why would these young people distribute guns in their communities? Why are they doing this?
They're doing it because they lack other opportunities. When I look at the history of America, and particularly the history of slavery, one of the main reasons that Africans were enslaved was because of economics and skin color.
Now, let me explain what I'm talking about. During the time that the New World was to be built, the Europeans had to make a decision whether they were going to enslave their own. They couldn't enslave their own because their own could assimilate. They couldn't enslave the Indians because the Indians knew the territory, and the Indians knew how to sneak up on people. But the only people they could enslave was the Africans because of their skin color. We couldn't assimilate, and because of our skin color if we escaped, we were sent back to our plantations pretty much.
If you look at American history from the time that slavery started, at least from the time that slavery started, every 10 to 30 years the government would do something to make sure that the black man was not able to compete economically. I know that we over the last 30 years will look back and we say there's been integration, there's been desegregation, but there's something we have to understand about integration and desegregation. Without assimilation there's no desegregation, nor is there integration, because people of all ethnic backgrounds have to be able to compete economically in order to build their families.
Slavery has hurt our families. It's hurt our families big time. The conditions of the inner cities has hurt our families and other people's families also, and it's always interesting to me to understand one thing. Actually, I was told this by a friend of mine and a friend of his told him. We always should look at the situation and ask ourselves a question. Why did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white? Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?
Well, it's interesting to me to know why now. When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it.
White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world.
Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure.
