Bono
Harvard Speech
......
Thank you for that introduction. But I suppose I should say a few more words
about who I am and what on earth I'm doing up here.
My name is Bono.
My name is Bono, and I'm a rock star.
Now, I tell you this, not as a boast but as a kind of confession. Because in my
view the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience a
celebrity with a cause. OH DEAR.
Worse yet, is a singer with a conscience, a placard-waving, knee-jerking,
fellow-travelling activist with a Lexus, and a swimming pool shaped like his own
head.
I'm a singer. You know what a singer is ? Someone with a hole in his heart as
big as his ego. When you need 20,000 people screaming your name in order to feel
good about your day, you know you re a singer.
I am a singer and a songwriter but I am also a father, four-times over; I am a
friend to dogs; I am a sworn enemy of the saccharine; and a believer in grace
over karma. I talk too much when I'm drunk and sometimes even when I'm not.
I am not drunk right now. These are not sunglasses and these are protection.
But I must tell you. I owe more than my spoiled lifestyle to rock music. I owe
my worldview. Music was like an alarm clock for me as a teenager and still keeps
me from falling asleep in the comfort of my freedom.
Rock music to me is rebel music. But rebelling against what ? In the Fifties it
was sexual mores and double standards. In the Sixties it was the Vietnam War and
racial and social inequality. What are we rebelling against now?
If I am honest I'm rebelling against my own indifference. I am rebelling against
the idea that the world is the way the world is and there's not a damned thing I
can do about it. So I'm trying to do some damned thing.
But fighting my indifference is my own problem. What's your problem ? What's the
hole in your heart? I needed the noise, the applause. You needed the grades. Why
are you here in Harvard Square?
Why do you have to listen to me? What have you given up to get here ? Is success
your drug of choice or are you driven by another curiosity? Your potential, the
potential of a given situation ? Is missing the moment unacceptable to you ? Is
wasting inspiration a crime? It is for a musician.
If this is where we find our lives rhyme; If this is our common ground, well
then I can be inspired as well as humbled, to be on this great campus. Because
that s where I come from - Music.
But I've seen the other side of music - the Business and I've seen success as a
drug of choice and I've seen great minds and prolific imaginations disappear up
their own ass, strung out on their own self importance and I'm one of them.
The misery of having it all your own way and the loneliness of sitting at a
table where everyone works for you and the emptiness of arriving at Aspen on a
Gulfstream to stay in your winter palace. ...sorry different speech.
You know what I'm talking about and you've got to keep asking yourself why are
you doing this? You've got to keep checking your motives.
Success for my group U2 has been a lot easier to conjure than say, relevance.
RELEVANCE - in the world, in the culture.
And of course, failure is not such a bad thing ... It's not a word that many of
you know. I'm sure it's what you fear the most. But from an artists point of
view, failure is where you get your best material.
So fighting indifference versus making a difference. Let me tell you a few
things you haven't heard about me, even on the Internet.
Let me tell you how I enrolled at Harvard and slept with an Economics Professor.
That's right I became a student at Harvard recently, and came to work with
Professor Jeffrey Sachs at CID to study the lack of development in third-world
economies due to the crushing weight of old debts those economies were carrying
for generations.
It turns out that the normal rules of bankruptcy don't apply to sovereign
states. Listen, it would be harder for you to get a student loan than it was for
President Mobutu to stream billions of dollars into his Swiss bank account while
his people starved on the side of the road. Two generations later, the Congolese
are still paying. The debts of the fathers are now the debts of the sons and the
daughters.
So I was here representing a group that believed that all such debts should be
cancelled in the year 2000. We called it Jubilee 2000. A fresh start for a new
millennium...
It was headed up by Anne Pettifor, based out of London, huge support from
Africa. With Mohammed Ali, Sir Bob Geldof and myself, acting at first just as
mouthpieces. It was taking off, but we were way behind in the US.
We had the melody line, so to speak. But in order to get it on the radio over
here, we needed a lot of help. My friend Bobby Shriver suggested I knock on the
good professors door and and a funny thing happened. Jeffrey Sachs not only let
me into his office, he let me into his Rolodex, his head and his life for the
last few years. So in a sense he let me in to your life here at Harvard.
Then Sachs and I, with my friend Bobby Shriver, hit the road like some kind of
surreal crossover act - a rock star, a Kennedy, and a Noted Economist
crisscrossing the globe like the Partridge Family on psychotropic drugs.
With the POPE acting as our well "Agent". And the blessing of various
Rabbis, Evangelists, mothers unions, trade unions and PTAs.
It was a new level of unhip for me, but it was really cool. It was in that
capacity that I slept with Jeff Sachs, each of us in our own seat on an economy
flight to somewhere, passed out like a couple of drunks from sheer exhaustion.
It was confusing for everyone I looked up with one eye to see your hero's
stubble in all the wrong places... His tie looked more like a headband. An
airhostess asked if he were a member of the Grateful Dead.
I have enormous respect for Jeff Sachs but it's really true what they say.
Students shouldn't sleep with their professors ...
While I'm handing out trade secrets, I also want to tell you that Larry Summers,
your incoming President, the man whose signature is on every American dollar -
is a nutcase and a freak.
Look, U2 made it big out of Boston, not New York or LA, so I thought if anyone
would know about our existence it would be a Treasury Secretary from Harvard
[and MIT]. Alas, no. When I said I was from U2 he had a flashback from Cuba
1962.
How can I put this? And don't hold it against him - Mr. Summers is, as former
President Clinton confirmed to me last week in Dublin, culturally challenged .
But when I asked him to look up from the numbers to see what we were talking
about he did more than that. He did the hardest thing of all for an Economist -
he saw through the numbers.
And if it was hard for me to enlist Larry Summers in our efforts, imagine how
hard it was for Larry Summers to get the rest of Washington to cough up the
cash. To really make a difference for the third of the world that lives on less
than a dollar a day.
He more than tried. He was passionate. He turned up in the offices of his
adversaries. He turned up in restaurants with me to meet the concerns of his
Republican counterparts. There is a posh restaurant in Washington they won't let
us in now. Such was the heat of his debate, blood on the walls wine in the
vinegar.
If you're called up before the new President of Harvard and he gives you the
hairy eyeball, drums his fingers and generally acts disinterested it could be
the beginning of a great adventure.
Well, it's at this point that I have to ask - if your family don't do it first -
why am I telling you these stories? It's certainly not because I am running for
role model.
I'm telling you these stories because all that fun I had with Jeff Sachs and
Larry Summers was in the service of something deadly serious. When people around
the world heard about the burden of debt that crushes the poorest countries,
when they heard that for every dollar of government aid we sent to developing
nations, nine dollars came back in debt service payments - when they heard all
that, people got angry.
They took to the streets in what was without doubt the largest grassroots
movement since the campaign to end apartheid. Politics is, as you know, normally
the art of the possible but this was something more interesting. This was
becoming the art of the impossible. We had Priests going into pulpits, pop stars
into parliaments. The Pope put on my sunglasses.
The religious right started acting like student protesters. And finally, after a
floor fight in the House of Representatives, we got the money - four three five
million. That four three five, which is starting to be a lot of money, and more
importantly leveraged billions more from other rich countries.
So where does that money go? Well, so far 23 of the poorest countries have
managed to meet the sometimes over-stringent conditions to get their debt
payments reduced and to spend the money on the people who need it most. In
Uganda, twice as many kids are now going to school. That's good. In Mozambique,
debt payments are down 42 per cent, allowing health spending to increase by $14
million. That's good, too. $14 million goes a long way in Mozambique.
If I could tell you about one remarkable man in rural Uganda named Dr. Kabira.
In 1999, measles, a disease that s almost unheard of in the U.S. killed hundreds
of kids in Dr. Kabira's district. Now, thanks to debt relief, he s got an
additional $6,000 from the state, enough for him to employ two new nurses and
buy two new bicycles so they can get around the district and immunize children.
Last year, measles was a killer. This year, Dr. Kabira saw less than ten cases.
I just wanted you to know what we pulled off with the help of Harvard with the
help of people like Jeffrey Sachs.
Bono
and Jeffrey Sachs sharing a smile with the Harvard crowd
But I'm not here to brag, or to take credit, or even to share it. Why am I here?
Well, again I think to just say thanks. But also, I think I've come here to ask
you for your help. This is a big problem. We need some smart people working on
it. I think this will be the defining moment of our age. When the history books
(that some of you will write) make a record of our times, this moment will be
remembered for two things: the Internet and the everyday holocaust that is
Africa. Twenty five million HIV positives who will leave behind 40 million AIDS
orphans by 2010. This is the biggest health threat since the Bubonic Plague
wiped out a third of Europe.
It s an unsustainable problem for Africa and, unless we hermetically seal the
continent and close our conscience, it's an unsustainable problem for the world
but it's hard to make this a popular cause because it's hard to make it pop, you
know? That I guess, is what I'm trying to do. Pop is often the oxygen of
politics.
Didn't John and Robert Kennedy come to Harvard? Isn't equality a son of a bitch
to follow through on. Isn't Love thy neighbour in the global village so
inconvenient? GOD writes us these lines but we have to sing them. Take them to
the top of the charts but its not what the radio is playing. Is it ? I know.
But we've got to follow through on our ideals or we betray something at the
heart of who we are. Outside these gates, and even within them, the culture of
idealism is under siege beset by materialism and narcissism and all the other
isms of indifference and their defense mechanism knowingness, the smirk, the
joke. Worse still, it s a marketing tool. They've got Martin Luther King selling
phones now. Have you seen that?
Civil Rights in America and Europe are bound to human rights in the rest of the
world. The right to live like a human. But these thoughts are expensive, they re
going to cost us. Are we ready to pay the price? Is America still a great idea
as well as a great country?
When I was a kid in Dublin, I watched in awe as America put a man on the moon
and I thought, wow this is mad! Nothing is impossible in America! America - they
can do anything over there!
Is that still true? Tell me it s true. It is true isn't it? And if it isn't, you
of all people can make it true again.
To
learn more about Bono and U2 visit the sites below
http://www.u2.com/intro.html
http://www.u2mansion.com
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