An Open Letter to Bono, Rebel Statesman

Dear Bono:

Let me start by saying what I would have said to you if I'd had the chance on Friday night at Penn: Thank you for your music and your works. You really are a remarkable man, and I am proud to count you as one of my few real heroes.

That being said, I have to let you know that I came away from your address to the World Affairs Council feeling a bit agitated. I anticipated your remarks all day long, and rushed over to Penn after work with a bounce in my step. "It's our hero!" I have never been an autograph seeker or a fan of the stalking variety. I snuck in and snuck out of the auditorium, and passed up any chance I might have had to share a few words or handshake with you. I really just wanted to hear what you had to say.

When I first started paying attention to you, over twenty years ago, you were a rebel waving a white flag. A few years later, you were a vocal critic of the Reagan Administration and its policy of construction engagement with South Africa during the apartheid era. You never shied from a controversial political comment, consequences be damned. People took shots at you for often putting your foot in your mouth or taking yourself too seriously, but it was your sense of earnestness and urgency about questions of justice that made you such a compelling figure to me, at a time when I was young and certainly very impressionable.

Fast forward to 2005, and my how the world has changed. The global political climate, and your role within it, have been entirely transformed. Most importantly, with regard to my present unease, the United States now finds itself in a very precarious and dangerous moment. These are peculiar and disturbing times to live in America, to be subject to the whims and ideology of the current Administration. Entire communities of disenfranchised Americans have been washed away, displaced. A woman's right to choose is hanging by a thread. Corporate cronyism is the order of the day. Many, many Americans are struggling to maintain a decent standard of living, to provide for their children. This is not the American dream. This is not "the idea of America" of which you are so openly enamored.

I winced, as I am sure many of your admirers did, when I saw you photographed in the Oval Office with President Bush. I understand the strategy you have employed as you have implored leaders of the world's richest nations to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries, and to increase aid to Africa in an effort to combat the unspeakable poverty there. But on Friday, when you spoke so fervently, as you always do, about your love of America, and the ideals she represents, when you highlighted the charitable impulses of her people, I could not help but think about the ways in which America's current government has forsaken so many of its own people. Along these same lines, you noted in your comments on Friday that the travesty in Africa would not be permitted to happen anywhere else in the world. I could only interpret that as a veiled reference to global racism, just a different manifestation of the same virus that still eats away at the heart of the idea of America, of real equality

I am sure that the United States looks a lot different to you, as an Irishman, than it does to me, as an American. When I was young, and persumably a little less sophisticated, I was always thrilled and a little pissed off when you would take shots at America. "That's my country! You can't say those things! Besides, you're from Ireland! What do you know?" Now though, at a time when America - or at least her government - desperately needs someone to hold a mirror up to her so she can she her deep flaws, the ways in which she has strayed from her ideals, I find myself wishing that there was a way that you could spend some of your tremendous moral capital on helping us find our way back to a place of justice for all of our citizens. Justice is your call - that's what you told us on Friday. I just have a hard time believing our government is committed to exporting justice to Africa when we can't even seem to realize it within our own borders.

I admire your optimism, your ceaseless appeals to the best in everyone. your belief that seemingly impossible ideals can be made real. It's just that right now, the world seems like an incredibly messy, ugly and complicated place, and I worry that your pure brand of idealism might get buried beneath the rubble in Baghdad and the detritus along the banks of the Mississippi. I dearly hope that I am wrong.

You said on Friday that you are up for any excuse to come to Philly these days. I hope you were serious. You have made a lot of friends here, as you have everywhere. So next time you are in town, look me up. Maybe we can talk about a few things.

Keep up the fight.

In solidarity,

Emily