He’s a celebrity who understands the power he has to make people listen. He’s a rich man who’s giving his time and passion to try to help some of the poorest people in the world. The premise of this “Heart of America” tour, which Bono led on a seven-state blitz Dec. 1-8, was that politicians in Washington don’t think the people in the middle of America care that 6,500 people are dying every day of AIDS in Africa. Bono thinks they’re wrong.
He’s trying to organize networks of activists to put pressure on the elected officials, and to funnel money from prosperous countries such as the United States to buy medicine for HIV-infected Africans. Many Africans can’t afford the dollar a day it costs for medicine, so they’re dying “for the stupidest of reasons — money,” Bono said in the chapel of the national offices of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), speaking to the denomination’s synod and presbytery moderators. Repeatedly, he said today’s children will judge their parents on how they respond to the crisis of AIDS in Africa — analogous, he said, to whether people who witnessed Jews being loaded onto trains in the 1930s even inquired as to where the trains were going.
“This is going to get down to equality — you know that, don’t you?” Bono told the crowd at Northeast Christian Church. Equality, “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.”
People in Africa can’t get drugs that people in the U.S. and Europe take for granted, Bono said. And without the drugs, they die. “God isn’t having any of it,” Bono said. “I think God is in Heaven on his knees to the church on this one. I think God almighty is on his knees to us, to turn around this supertanker of indifference.”
Watching the “Heart of America” tour hit town was like watching a high-speed train roll in, although Bono and his friends — including the actors Chris Tucker and Ashley Judd — actually traveled on buses. These folks liked to zoom in unannounced to “ordinary” locations — truck stops, a Krispy Kreme doughnut store — but also were drill-team organized, cell phones clutched in every hand, meeting with pre-arranged groups at churches and colleges and newspaper editorial boards, handing out the tickets to invited groups with little publicity, protected from the crowds by broad-chested guys wearing shirts with “SECURITY” emblazoned across their backs.
But that’s just the mechanics of the thing. Bono’s also a soft-spoken father of four from Dublin who isn’t easily categorized, who stands before a gauntlet of reporters, wearing those famous blue glasses and clearly in charge but still a little rumpled, hands stuffed into his pockets, white shirttail sneaking out from under his sweater, accidentally knocking over one of the signs advertising his tour. After he messes up one answer — trying to tell the story of a tattooed truck driver he met in Indiana — Bono grins and says, “Can I just start this over?”
What exactly will come out of a tour like this isn’t easy to say. There certainly was energy — especially from the Gateway Ambassadors, a musical ensemble made of up children from Ghana. And Agnes Nyamayarwo, a nurse and AIDS activist from Uganda infected with HIV, dug into her heart day after day repeating her painful and powerful story, how her husband became sick with meningitis and was found to have AIDS; how the family bought him medicine until “we couldn’t afford to buy it anymore;” how they had to stand by and watch him die without any treatment. She then found out that she was HIV-infected. The couple had 10 children, and her oldest, a 17-year-old boy, became distraught over what might happen to the children if both his parents were to die. One night, he disappeared from school. His mother searched and searched, but never found him. She has no idea if he’s alive or dead, has no body to wash and bury. Her youngest child, a 5-year-old son, then became ill with AIDS, and she had to watch him succumb, “knowing he was innocent and he got the HIV from me.”
By this time, the singer Wynonna Judd — who had taken her sister Ashley’s place on the tour — was mopping her eyes with a tissue.
Bono contended that when Americans understand what’s happening with AIDS in Africa — 3.5 million people infected with HIV this year, 2.4 million dying of the disease, half a million mothers passing the virus on to their babies — they will respond, with compassion and resources and by pressuring elected officials to give the money to provide the medicine that Africa needs. Until she met Bono, Nyamayarwo could not afford the anti-retroviral drugs that she now takes, and which have given her the strength to go back to work as a nurse and to care for her eight remaining children.
But Wynonna Judd also talked about apathy, how caught up the American people can be in the ordinariness of their own lives. “When I read the statistics here, I wept,” Judd said. But “I think it’s really hard to get involved . . . It’s hard to get outside your own stuff. We’re busy Christmas shopping” — it’s hard to get Americans living comfortable lives to pay attention to the sick and dying halfway around the world.
This tour was sponsored by the nonprofit group DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), and took Bono and the buses through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. In Louisville, Bono met for less than half an hour with Presbyterians attending the annual Moderator’s Conference, and also met with PC(USA) Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick. (“My daughters and grand-daughters will be amazed at what I’m doing this afternoon,” Ann Beran Jones, vice-moderator of the 214th General Assembly, said in introducing Bono.)
“It sounds like I’m preaching to the converted, really,” Bono said after listening to part of a presentation on PC(USA) involvement in Africa. “This is a church that has done so much . . . I wish every church was feeling this passion.”
Bono is not new to activism — and out of concern for what he calls “an emergency,” not a cause, in Africa, he’s built alliances that cut across political boundaries, traveling to Africa with Paul O’Neill, until recently President Bush’s treasury secretary; meeting with Jesse Helms and with Democrats and with European leaders. He’ll work with anyone — cool and hip or grey-haired — willing to get on board.
“History will judge our whole age by probably three things,” Bono said. The Internet. The war on terror. And how we let an entire continent burst into flames and stood around with watering cans — or not.”
Over and over, Bono has told the story of visiting a refugee camp in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, of how a father who’d walked through the night for food tried to hand Bono his son, so the boy would have a chance to live. “We had to say no,” Bono told the crowd in Louisville. “Well, it’s the last time I’m saying no.”
Asked about his own faith, Bono said, “I’m not a very good advertisement for God. I don’t wear that badge on my lapel, but it’s certainly written on the inside of me. I’m a believer.” He said later that he doesn’t spend much time in churches, because “I find them often pious places and the Christ I hear them preach doesn’t match what I read in the gospels. But God is in the house tonight.”
