Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

To “treat others as you treat yourself” is a bit of a pothole on the road to financial or even cultural dominance.

American evangelical Tony Campolo explaining that there are 2,003 verses of scripture that relate to the poor, that poverty is second only to redemption in the priorities of the God found in the Old and New Testaments.

And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.”

And yet for some reason even now people of faith think that what’s going on in their—or other people’s—pants is more important to God than, say, what’s happening to the homeless. The lives of the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity, but sometimes religion seems to be what happens when Jesus, like Elvis, has left the building. It becomes a bless me club for the Holy Rollers and navel gazers.

If the lyrics were born in a feeding station in famine-ravaged Ethiopia, all the more bizarre that fifteen years later a car company offered us $23 million to use “Streets” in a commercial. I won’t say we didn’t agonize.

but turn it down we did based on one comment out of the side of the mouth of a great friend and champion, Jimmy Iovine. “You can take the deal,” he said. “But you just have to prepare for that moment when you say ‘God walks through the room’ being known instead as ‘Oh, they’re playing that car ad.’ ”

Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl The sweetest thing. —“Sweetest Thing”

Naïve but kinda not. When we promised “till death do us part,” we understood both its literality and its poetics, that this marriage thing was a grand madness: jumping off a cliff believing you can fly. Only in the air to discover you might actually be able to do this. We flaunted the odds, made ourselves dependent on the miraculous, and didn’t have far to look to see that though marriage is a great analgesic, it can also be the source of the pain.

It was not to be a concept album, but we had a vague concept in the background guiding both lyric and music that I was calling “The Two Americas,” which was to be a clashing, contrasting vision not just of North versus South, rich versus poor, native versus nativist but maybe more important of real versus imagined America.

The Māori have a very evolved view of how to bury their dead. Their version of an Irish wake is called a tangi. In a traditional Māori tangi you speak directly with your lost loved one, laugh with them, say sorry for when you let them down. It’s a powerful immersive experience, where you let waves of anger and grief, rage and laughter, break over you.

a modus that became a prayer in our family. Simple. Direct. Make us useful, dear God. We’re available. How can we be useful in this world where we find ourselves?

And if the comic takes the stage and no one laughs And dances on his own grave for a photograph This is not a curtain call this is the greatest act of all A stand up for freedom…

The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires.

When it works, it’s a thrill making stuff up on the spot, but it’s frustrating when you jump off into the unknown and there’s nothing there to meet you. The other price of admission is willingness. Willing to be there and willing it on. You have to will it on.

How I understood that in the end I am one quarter of an artist without Edge, Adam, and Larry. How I am one half of a person without Ali. Exit signs flickering up in the stands, I looked around the stage at my co-dependents and noticed my own gratitude. We’re one and for a split second we’re the same.

I’ve never been to AA, but I get a sense of the spirituality of the 12 Steps in the idea of “breathing underwater,” a phrase I heard from the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr. Taking responsibility for yourself is one of the most important steps, along with surrendering to your higher power.

Illumination is the experience we all reach for in chapels and churches, in mosques and synagogues. We search for a light without which we only half see ourselves.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I’m scared of breaking the promise we made to each other as kids, that we wouldn’t sell out our vision of music for an easy life. I’m scared we’re becoming the enemy of who we used to be. It’s not even the fear of being a has-been. It’s the fear of having been and gone and not deserving your place.

It’s the artist’s dilemma: the problem isn’t out there but in here. We confuse our self-esteem with our self-expression. We confuse our life with our work when the work isn’t working out.

When all that noise quietens, the moment I know a show is really working is when I feel that the song is singing me, rather than me singing the song.

Owning up to being a showman is probably what saved me. When I put the makeup on and assume the character of Mr. MacPhisto in our show, I am able to speak the words that wouldn’t normally trip off my tongue. Give someone a mask, as Wilde put it, and they will tell you the truth.

“Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.”

Difficult decisions in art and in business are made by standing over a position and allowing your three closest friends to kick the shite out of it. It can be bruising. And I recognize my own role in all this. How I can be over-the-top in standing up for what I believe in, how very wearying that must be.

Kofi Annan captured it: “AIDS is far more than a health crisis. It is a threat to development itself.”

Senegalese proverb, “If you want to cut a man’s hair, be sure he is in the room.”

The idea that Jesus might have died for everyone, not just those who saw themselves as morally upright, had passed them by. Along with any parallel with the so-called untouchables of Jesus’s day, those with leprosy, the ones he sought out to welcome and heal.

Love thy neighbor, I used to say, is not advice. It’s a command. Right? Whoever our neighbor is. Wherever.

Where you live should not decide Whether you live or whether you die Three to a bed Sister Anne, she said Dignity passes by. —“Crumbs from Your Table”

That’s too easy, he came back. “People don’t trust you if you ask them to do stuff that’s too easy. Ask them to do more difficult things, and you’ll increase your chances.”

“Don’t appeal to the conscience of America,” he replied. “Appeal to the greatness of America. That’s how you’ll get the job done.”

We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill As the day begs the night for mercy, love. A sun so bright it leaves no shadows only scars carved into stone on the face of earth.

To be a man of the world but not this one is, I guess, the idea behind the song. You get the sense that the singer is not sure if that’s possible but he’s gonna try as hard as hell. In the end it’s the bass that offers the devil denial, the bass that offers the great “fuck off.”

“Like slavery and apartheid,” he said, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.”

“Let us bow our heads,” he said, addressing our traveling circus, half of whom were not at all religious. “Let us ask the Holy Spirit into the room to bless the work going on in this building, and to search of our hearts for how we can do more to fulfill Your Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

I once asked him if it was hard, with all his work, to find time for prayer and meditation. He shot me one of those looks. “How do you think we could do any of this work without prayer and meditation?”

He taught me that prayer is not an escape from real life but a passage toward it. Like him, we do have to dine with our enemies, to make ourselves known to each other, but he knew that if we are to face difficult truths, we first need a thorough outing of how we became ourselves, both as countries and as individuals.

“The people have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.”

You can disagree on everything but still work together on one thing…if that one thing is important enough.

You can kick arse when politicians don’t do what they promised, and you don’t have to kiss arse when they do…though,

Data and facts tell us that different approaches work in different geographies but also that there are some universal truths…like how gender equality is a force multiplier.

If you don’t have a seat at the table you’re probably on the menu. Who’s got the power really matters.

Not only is there more renewable energy to unlock in the sun, there’s also fusion.

The rules of governance work when citizens can see who’s breaking them. In countries, companies, communities.

Vote with your purse or wallet.

Evidence-based activism—aka factivism. Data holds solutions and stories. Statistics can sing.

as John Stuart Mill put it, “One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”

Only when I look deeper still into the mythology of the United States can I understand my determination to wake up in the dream that is America, the dream of a country where you really have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

senator Obama spoke of there being no red states, no blue states, only the United States, but I’ve always seen two Americas. Not a Republican one and a Democratic one, or even a rich one and a poor one, rather a real one and an imagined one. An operational America whose entrepreneurial capitalism is changing and charging the world and a mythic America that is a poetic idea in which we all have a stake.