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The End of Poverty
Equality is a very big idea, connected to freedom, but an idea doesn’t come for free. In a world where distance no longer determines who your neighbor is, paying the price for equality is not just heart, it’s smart. The destinies of the “haves” are intrinsically linked to the fates of the “have-nothing-at-alls”. If we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.
“The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty.” Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper – and smarter – to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?
We could be the first generation to outlaw the kind of extreme, stupid poverty that sees a child die of hunger in a world of plenty, or of a disease preventable by a twenty-cent inoculation. We are the first generation that has enough power to do that. The first generation that is powerful enough to unknot the whole tangle of bad trade, bad debt, and bad luck. The first generation that can end a corrupt relationship between the powerful and the weaker parts of the world which has been so wrong for so long.
If the rich nations decided they could become slightly “poorer”, they would truly help the nations in need. If they agreed to write off the old debts of the poor countries, the whole world would be safer. This year millions of people gathered to persuade world leaders to invest more in fighting poverty and disease in Africa.
We cannot save energy life. But the ones we can, we must. It is – or it ought to be – unacceptable that an accident of longitude determines whether a child lives or dies. Fifteen thousand people dying needlessly every day from AIDS, TB, and malaria. Behind each of these statistics is someone’s daughter, someone’s son, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother.
This is Africa’s crisis. That it’s not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency – that’s our crisis.
(adapted from Bono’s foreword to the End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs, Penguin Press, and “This is Generation’s Moon Shot”, by Bono in Time)