Quotes about Africa?

[madonna's child]

I need some Bono quotes about Africa. Please lend me whatever you have. Thanks!

 

[starsgoblue]

"It's not about charity, it's about justice"

"Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment. Because there's no way we can look at Africa - a continent bursting into flames - and if we're honest conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Anywhere else. Certainly not here. In Europe. Or America. Or Australia, or Canada. There's just no chance.
He continued: "You see, deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We've got watering cans; when what we really need are the fire brigades."

 

[starsgoblue]

"Isn't equality a son of a bitch to follow through on. Isn't "Love thy neighbour" in the global village so inconvenient?"

"Eight million people die every year for the price of going out with your friends to the movies and buying an ice cream. Literally for about $30 a head per year, you could save 8 million lives. Isn't that extraordinary? Preventable disease - not calamity, not famine, nothing like that. Preventable disease - just for the lack of medicines. That is cheap, that is a bargain."

"Every era has its defining struggle and the fate of Africa is one of ours. It's not the only one, but in the history books it's easily going to make the top five, what we did or what we did not do. It's a proving ground, as I said earlier, for the idea of equality. But whether it's this or something else, I hope you'll pick a fight and get in it."

 

[starsgoblue]

"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."

From the Havard address (excerpt):

"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!" Nothing was impossible, only human nature and it followed because it was led.

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."

 

[starsgoblue]

From The O'Reilly Factor:

"What we want here is to -- why is it not an emergency? How can three of these a week, three Madison Square Gardens a week, how can -- you know, a giant stadium every two weeks disappearing, you know, a preventable, treatable disease like AIDS, how can that not be an emergency?"

"I'm not asking drug companies to behave like philanthropists. I'm saying we, our governments, United States and Europe, have to deal with this problem. If we don't, we will reap a very ill wind. This is -- it's not just being bleeding hearts here. The strategic implications. There's 10 million AIDS orphans in Africa right now. There will be 20 by the end of the decade. 12 right now. This is chaos. This is a consummating (ph) havoc, and the war against terror, which you talk about every night, is bound up in the war against poverty. I didn't say that. Colin Powell said that."

"Look, if you see a car crash, somebody's lying there in the middle of the road bleeding and it turns out they're a drunk driver, you're still going to call an ambulance. We can't make these judgments about entire civilizations. We try to re-educate people, we try to deal with the problem. And by the way, not dealing with the problem with something like AIDS, which metastasized, which grows on a geometric level, is really foolhardy. Because it will be more expensive to deal with it later."

"But we can't even judge mentalism, and we're not wrong in the statements you've made to excuse our inaction. That's not going to fly... God is not going to accept that as an answer and history is not going to accept that as an answer."

 

[starsgoblue]

"We have the know-how. We have the cash. We have the lifesaving drugs. But do we have the will?"

“It shouldn’t be that where in the world you live determines whether you live in the world”

"You didn't start it, but you can end
it. We need your help. Let's rock and roll."

"It's a lot more glamorous for a rock star to be on the barricades with a handkerchief over his nose throwing Molotov cocktails than it is to be wearing a suit and a bowler hat and turning up at town hall meetings, I can tell you. But again, if you have the chance to climb over those barricades and go through those security checkpoints and enter those corridors of power and enter those rooms where decisions are made you should be there making your case quietly, with whispers and reason. But if that didn't work, I'm ready to be out on the streets. This is an obscenity on the level of the Holocaust. There are many more lives will be lost to this than died in the Holocaust.
There's a congressman, Tom Lantos [D-Calif.], who was in Auschwitz. Years later, the thing that haunted him most wasn't his treatment in Auschwitz, which was appalling and beyond description. The thing that haunted him were the looks from the passersby as they were being put on the trains as kids -- being put on trains and people not asking questions about where those kids were going because they kinda knew the answer. And I asked him, is there an analogy here? We have 7,000 people dying every day. We have the drugs that can keep them alive. Is there an analogy here? It's a hard thing to ask a survivor of Auschwitz. And he said, I think it's exactly analogous. He then wrote me a letter and said feel free to talk about my life in those terms and he encouraged me to lie across the tracks. And whatever it takes, we have to at least, whether we're artists, business people, politicians, we have to raise the alarm on what history will describe as one of the most crucial and defining moral issues of the age."

 

[starsgoblue]

"Excuses?

Horseshit.

Earlier I described the deaths of 6,500 Africans a day from a preventable treatable disease like aids: I watched people queuing up to die, three in a bed in Malawi.

That's Africa's crisis.

But the fact that we in Europe or America are not treating it like an emergency-and the fact that its not every day on the news, well that is our crisis.

And that's not horseshit, that's something much worse, I don't even know what that says about us."

 

[Jamila]

Good job, stars -

Couldn't have done better myself.

THIS IS THE TIME TO FINISH WHAT YOU'VE STARTED. THIS IS NO TIME TO DREAM....

 

[starsgoblue]

After LiveAid [in 1985], I went there to work with my wife. We spent a month in Ethiopia in the middle of the famine. I saw stuff there that reorganized the way I saw the world. I didn't know quite what to do about it. You can throw pennies at the problem, but at a certain point, I felt God is not looking for alms, God is looking for action. You can't fix every problem, but the ones that you can, we have to [fix]."

"Our generation will be known for the Internet, the war on terror and how we let an entire continent burst into flames while we stood around with watering cans—or not. I think it's exciting to be part of a generation that actually says 'No.' Now, the world is a smaller place; distance cannot decide who is our neighbor to love. Love thy neighbor. We can't afford not to. The world is too close."

 

[starsgoblue]

Speaking of his experience in his first trip to Africa in 1985:

"You'd wake up in the morning, and mist would be lifting," Bono recalls. "You'd walk out of your tent, and you'd count bodies of dead and abandoned children. Or worse, the father of a child would walk up to you and try to give you his living child and say, 'You take it, because if this is your child, it won't die.'"

"When you sing, you make people vulnerable to change in their lives. You make yourself vulnerable to change in your life. But in the end, you've got to become the change you want to see in the world."

 

[starsgoblue]

Summing up his trip to Africa with O'Neil:

No. I tell you, it is not really about what he taught me and what I taught him. It is about what we were both taught by the people that we met. We have met people that have changed our lives in a way that we will not easily forget.

And you know, I met this boy, [an] amazing character. He was on HIV. He looked so great, picture of health. Five years ago, he was half his body weight. He had TB. He had scratches all over his arms from itching. Just because he stumbled into a French aid program, from Medecins Sans Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders], his life has been transformed. But guess what? He has two kids. He has lost their mother to HIV/AIDS.

His new woman in his life, has been with her two years, she has HIV. So here is his choice. He shares the drugs with her and they both die slowly. He gives the drugs to her, and those kids lose their last parent. Or he keeps the drugs, and loses the love of his life. I don't think that's a -- I don't think that, in a civilized world, that we make him make that decision.

 

[starsgoblue]

Speaking about the Christian role in AIDS

"That there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in s--- and straw and poverty, is genius. And brings me to my knees, literally.

Christ's example is being demeaned by the church if they ignore the new leprosy, which is AIDS. The church is the sleeping giant here. If it wakes up to what's really going on in the rest of the world, it has a real role to play. If it doesn't, it will be irrelevant.

To some people the church is their ticket to respectability, a certain bourgeois point of view, a safety net for when they go to bed. My idea of Christianity is no safety net, a scathing attack on bourgeois values, and a risk to respectability.

By the way, I don't set myself up as any kind of Christian. I can't live up to that. It's something I aspire to, but I don't feel comfortable with that badge. It's the badge I want to wear."

 

[starsgoblue]

Bono makes no apologies for using his celebrity status to push for change:

"One of the things we've heard time and again is how ridiculous celebrity is. But it is currency, and we can spend it wisely."

 

[starsgoblue]

"Well, the going rate for change is not cheap. Big ideas are expensive."

 

[starsgoblue]

"This is going to get down to equality — you know that, don't you? What an amazing radical idea. It comes out of the Scriptures . . . We have to accept that our brothers and sisters who live in Africa are equal to us. They are equal before God's eyes. And with the benefits of globalization come some of the responsibilities."

 

[starsgoblue]

General Bono quotes but I feel they still aptly apply to his heart towards the situation:

"Revolution starts at home, in your heart, in your refusal to compromise your beliefs and your values. I'm not interested in politics like people fighting back with sticks and stones, but in the politics of love. I think there is nothing more radical than two peoples loving each other, because it's so infrequent"

"It's your future. The only limits are the limits of your imagination. Dream up the kind of world you want to live in - dream out loud. At high volume!"

"You must be political at times, but sometimes you have to look beyond that, to just the state of the human spirit."

 

[starsgoblue]

Talking about Band Aid :

“And it changed my life that song y’know? It brought me to Live Aid then brought me to Africa and Africa is an extraordinary place. An extraordinary shining place. Beautiful continent full of these royal people, incredible people, as well as this awfulness that they’re in. There’s so much to believe in Africa. And the thing that gets to me is they really believe in us. They really believe we can help them. And we can if we really want to.

 

[Lisa71]

Hey, stars... Do you have a quote by Bono saying something to the effect.... We are all just sitting by watching them being loaded on the trains and doing nothing about it? (Speaking of Africans)?

 

[starsgoblue]

My fifth post (not quote but post) has Bono drawing the analogy of his conversation with a Holocaust survivor talking of how he remembers people just watching him board the train with Africa....I'll see what else I have....

"History has a way of making ideas that once seemed so acceptable ridiculous. An example would be the idea that one race is superior to another or the idea that the lucky few of us can live in some kind of glass case, separated from the sufferings of the many...We can choose to put our considerable resources and brainpower to get to grips with the AIDS emergency."

 

[starsgoblue]

“When I was growing up, I remember reading about the Holocaust and I remember thinking, Could that have happened? When my father and my grandfather were alive, did people really send Jews to the gas chambers?. And then you realize that the everyday Holocaust, that is Africa. And it’s just mind-boggling that we can’t get people to pay attention to this.”

 

[starsgoblue]

Excerpted from an interview for D&C magazine

B: He's the third inspiring story[Zackie Achmat from TAC].
He went on drug strike and refused to take ARVs whilst his fellow AIDS activists were not getting them. They took the South African government to court and won on the issue of generics. But he put his life on the line. That's the extraordinary thing, to be sitting, as I have, and hearing committees of activists, the heroes sitting around in their canteens discussing who is going to go on the drug treatment and who isn't. There's this woman, Prudence, who works for TAC telling me that she had just lost her sister to AIDS, just yesterday. And I was saying, "What are you doing here with me? Shouldn't you be with your family at this time?" She said, "No, no, this is the more important work, I've got to do this work" and I said, "Is it heartbreaking for you to lose your sister, to HIV/AIDS, when the drugs are available, to have kept her alive?" "No," she said, "If I'd had the drugs to give to my sister, I wouldn't have given them to her." And I was stopped in my tracks. I said, "If you had the drugs surely you would give them to your sister?" But she said, "I loved my sister more than life, but we have to give the drugs to the people who are keeping our effort going here. And there are people in the organisation who are more effective at going out into the field than my sister was, so they would have to get the drugs."


I felt like I had gone into the Mad Hatters tea party. I felt like somebody had dropped acid into my tea and I had woken up into this horrible nightmare that was the everyday life of these people, making choices, that no human being should have to make. To me this is like some Kafka novel where you can't actually believe what is happening. These drugs cost fucking nothing to make after research. At a time when people do not think that we are such a benign force in the world, we are letting people die for the stupidest of reasons. Money. It is so fucked up!

 

[starsgoblue]

I think this is what you wanted Lisa....

"There's a lot at stake here, obviously lives of people," Bono told journalists backstage at a briefing on the Chicagoland date. "I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake. If the church doesn't respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant. It would be like the way you heard stories of people watching the Jews get put on the trains during the Holocaust. We will be that generation who watched our African brothers and sisters get put on the trains."

 

[starsgoblue]

"It feels very much like a Civil Rights movement for our generation because in the end it's about equality and we mustn't forget that. A human life has value to God wherever it lives and we're not being let off the hook with geographical location being an excuse for somebody's life to be wasted. There's an excitement being part of that movement."

 

[starsgoblue]

"It is absolute madness that at a time of unimaginable prosperity in the world, that people can be dying at this level. There are cities in Africa where a third of the people are going to die, and we have the technology to prevent it."

 

[Jamila]

go girl (stars) -

If I wasn't still in recovery mode, I'd try to help ya, but you're doing fine on your own.

WE GET TO CARRY EACH OTHER....

 

[Lisa71]

Thanks. I was actually using them on another forum (Not U2 related). Hopefully, it struck a cord with some of the people there.

 

[starsgoblue]

go girl (stars) -

If I wasn't still in recovery mode, I'd try to help ya, but you're doing fine on your own.

Take care of yourself, Jamila. I hope you're feeling better!

 

[Jamila]

getting better everyday - thanks, stars.

THIS IS THE TIME TO FINISH WHAT YOU'VE STARTED. THIS IS NO TIME TO DREAM....

 

[madonna's child]

Thank you so much, Stars! You are wonderful!!! And now this thread is a great resource for anybody needing more info about Bono and Africa.

I used this one for a wallpaper I made today - "You must be political at times, but sometimes you have to look beyond that, to just the state of the human spirit."

 

[starsgoblue]

Isn't that quote just wonderful?

No prob, MC...if you need more let me know...