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Bono: The Gorgeous, Unglamorous Work of Freedom (The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/the-gorgeous-unglamorous-work-of-freedom/681212/https://archive.ph/12Ovw
-snip-
The reason I am climbing on this slippery soapbox called “freedom” today is because I’m being given a presidential medal by that name—an honor I’m receiving mainly for the work of others, among them my bandmates and our fellow activists—and it’s got me thinking again about the subject. When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the 1960s, that had its place, too. We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.
-snip-
Yes, it was twenty-five years ago almost to the month that the developing-world debt cancellation campaign brought me to the office of then-Senator Joe Biden. He was friendly—dropping references to County Mayo, even then reciting Seamus Heaney poems. But he was fearsome, too—ready to take a punch as well as throw them. That’s the kind of fighter you want on your side.
I left those meetings with a sense that the very ordinariness of the people who wrote the bills, who built the coalitions, whose day job was the grinding unglamorous work of serving freedom, was in fact their extraordinariness.
It’s what the fight for freedom needs today: faithful, stubborn, unselfish effort. For many years I quoted that line of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I now know it does not. It has to be bent. And that’s how the walls will finally come down: in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Gaza, across the Middle East, in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk. Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom.” I think he meant that freedom must be re-won by each generation. That is a fine call to action for a new year.
The reason I am climbing on this slippery soapbox called “freedom” today is because I’m being given a presidential medal by that name—an honor I’m receiving mainly for the work of others, among them my bandmates and our fellow activists—and it’s got me thinking again about the subject. When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the 1960s, that had its place, too. We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.
-snip-
Yes, it was twenty-five years ago almost to the month that the developing-world debt cancellation campaign brought me to the office of then-Senator Joe Biden. He was friendly—dropping references to County Mayo, even then reciting Seamus Heaney poems. But he was fearsome, too—ready to take a punch as well as throw them. That’s the kind of fighter you want on your side.
I left those meetings with a sense that the very ordinariness of the people who wrote the bills, who built the coalitions, whose day job was the grinding unglamorous work of serving freedom, was in fact their extraordinariness.
It’s what the fight for freedom needs today: faithful, stubborn, unselfish effort. For many years I quoted that line of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I now know it does not. It has to be bent. And that’s how the walls will finally come down: in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Gaza, across the Middle East, in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk. Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom.” I think he meant that freedom must be re-won by each generation. That is a fine call to action for a new year.
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