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There's more to the legend, of course, including a charming miracle-story with a touch of St. Francis. When Bono was three years old, it is said, his parents saw him playing in their garden, picking bees out of flowers with his fingers. He would speak to them and then place them back on the flowers, never receiving a single sting. 1
But the facts of the band's extraordinary impact are a matter of public record. By the early '80s they had earned a reputation for stirring audiences with powerful messages at every live performance. It became apparent that the charismatic front man Bono (he dropped the Vox shortly after the band's inception) was a proverbial genie-in-the-bottle waiting to be let free. Many cite the 1985 Live Aid concert for Africa as providing the occasion when he became permanently uncorked, jumping from the stage to dance with a fan in the crowd. It was then and there that the "fourth wall" of live performance was removed for U2.
The connection between Bono and Africa became permanent at that time as well. He has since become the most recognizable advocate for relieving the worst troubles of the continent: extreme poverty and AIDS. In 2002, with Sir Bob Geldolf, Bobby Shriver, and others, Bono formed DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), asking developed nations to treat Africa not just with charity but with equality and justice too. Bono, never one to dream small, has asked Western nations for a lot. He'd like them, on humanitarian grounds, to forgive the enormous debts owed to them by African nations so those nations can put the money they pay, which is barely servicing the interest on those debts, toward reducing poverty and hunger among their own people; he's lobbied rich nations to engage in fairer trade practices with poor nations; he's asked the most-developed Western nations to give 0.7 percent of their GNP in aid to the most-deprived countries in the world. In 2002, he persuaded President Bush to pledge $5 billion of aid to Africa over five years and then encouraged some U.S. Senators to push the proposed amount even higher (which they did).
Senator Jesse Helms and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill credit Bono with showing them the connection between debt relief and fighting AIDS. Bono expresses his dismay that a nation such as America, which has historically unprecedented medical and financial resources to treat disease, has seemed unwilling to do something truly significant to combat AIDS in Africa—to take it on as a national challenge, like the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. In a July 25 op-ed in the Boston Globe, Bono challenged both political parties to place AIDS on their short list of convention issues:
We are the first generation that really can do something about the kind of "stupid" poverty that sees children dying of hunger in a world of plenty or mothers dying for lack of a 20-cent drug that we take for granted. We have the science, we have the resources, what we don't seem to have is the will. This is an opportunity to show what America stands for. Antiretroviral drugs are great advertisements for American ingenuity and technology.
Showing his political savvy, he links waging a war on poverty and AIDS in Africa to improving America's global image, and argues for a different sort of "preemptive strike" in the war on terror:
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