The Gorgeous, Unglamorous Work of Freedom

“Freedom” is a word that turns up with embarrassing frequency in rock and roll songs. How we love to free-associate about freedom. On occasion we’re good for a “Chimes of Freedom,” (at least Bob Dylan is) but if we’re honest, the freedom musicians are most interested in is our own.

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.

Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation. The freedom songs of the folk singers went electric, the coded messages of gospel music burst into the full flower of funk and soul. Even disco promised emancipation, from Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” to Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out.” In U2 we wanted our song “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.

Outside the studio, it felt like freedom was unstoppable. In Europe, the generation before us had paid for our freedom in blood. We promised we would never forget. Yes, freedom was stalled here, suppressed there, but not forever, we thought. Walls were made to tumble. I think my generation believed that consciousness itself was evolving, that humankind was moving inevitably toward being freer and more equal—despite five or six millennia of evidence to the contrary. I believed it, anyway.

At age 18, we in U2 had our first proper go at activism at an anti-apartheid concert at Trinity College in Dublin. Later we answered the call of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to take up the cause of freedom again, in this case freedom from economic slavery, and help cancel the old Cold War debts of the least developed countries. Statistics don’t rhyme very well, so I couldn’t sing my way through this campaign. I needed what one of our friends, Bill Gates, would later refer to as a software update, which is to say, a bigger brain.

Rather than go back to school, I went to Africa for my education. Africa, a continent confronting yet another colonizing force… a virus. And what was the death sentence of HIV/AIDS if not a negation of freedom, namely the freedom to go on living? Bobby Shriver, Jamie Drummond, Lucy Matthew and I launched ONE and (RED) to help lift that death sentence. Our M.O. was to enlist a wide variety of politicians across the political spectrum and to do the same with the forces of commerce to make sure that life-saving medicine would reach the people whose lives depended on it, whether or not they could pay for a single pill. We were following the African activists who were leading the resistance to this nasty little virus in the form of groups like TASO in Uganda, TAC in South Africa, unsung heroes like Zackie Achmat who refused to take his own ARVs until they were available for all. And took the South African government to court to prove that he and HIV/AIDS existed.

Most of my life, freedom could really hold its head up. Freedom had attitude, freedom was an attitude. Walls really did tumble, not just the one in Berlin; the Iron Curtains of the Soviet Union were drawn back to reveal democracies struggling to be born, gasping for free air; and extreme poverty—a trap as confining and debilitating as any prison—released millions of people from its grip. Thanks to PEPFAR, that brilliant cross-party achievement of President George W. Bush, 26 million people have been freed to go on living despite an HIV diagnosis. And Jubilee USA reports that in the years since Drop the Debt—another bipartisan triumph, this one led in the U.S. by President Bill Clinton—an extra 54 million children have been able to go to school. That’s freedom right there.

So if freedom swaggered—or even sometimes staggered, carrying a drink and smoking a cheroot—we kind of forgave freedom, because it got results.

But where are we now, as my hero David Bowie sang? Is the Medal of Freedom a nostalgia act? Is freedom itself a nostalgia act? Maybe the idea of freedom as a guarantee. But not freedom as a mighty, worthy struggle.

In America, the land of the free, we saw in the last election that freedom is universally valued but not universally defined. For some it means the freedom to things like access to reproductive care, for others it means freedom from various forms of perceived government intrusion. It’s an old family argument—older than America itself.

While America wrestles with the meaning of freedom—not just what it is, but who gets it—in other parts of the world, people are literally dying for it. In Ukraine, freedom is a brutally direct, existential question, framed by Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs: are your lives worth this fight, this struggle? In Sudan, a civil war whose parties are supported by great powers poses the question of what freedom means when famine is not even considered a new tool of war and hardly makes the news.

Across the Middle East, freedom has always been at the beneficence of the great powers passing through rather than the great peoples born of the Levant. In Syria now we see the first, tentative shoots of freedom after Assad and Putin squeezed and choked the life out of this most mythological ground.  But caution is the word. Seeds of democracy can be scattered or trampled. Even in the Queen of Sheba’s Yemen we see Iran trample on more treasured peoples and impose its brand of fundamentalism not just on its neighbors but its own people, mostly Persian but also Kurdish, like Mahsa Amina. Women and men yearning to breathe free—free of the vice and virtue police. Yes, that’s really their formal title.

And then there’s Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister for almost 20 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, has often used the defense of Israel’s freedom and its people as an excuse to systematically deny the same freedom and security to the Palestinians—a self-defeating and deadly contradiction, which has led to an obscene leveling of civilian life that the world can visualize daily on their cellphones. Freedom must come for the Israeli hostages, whose kidnapping by Hamas ignited this latest cataclysm. Freedom must come for the Palestinian people. It does not take a prophet to predict Israel will never be free until Palestine is free.

Freedom is complex and demanding. It might even be a little dull, the work of freedom. Certainly the work of peacemakers. Which I’ve witnessed and of course don’t have the stamina for. The fluorescent lights, the conference tables with plates of stale sandwiches, the late nights of hard work and of missing your families back home. In Ireland during the late 1990s, I wasn’t in those rooms, but we all held our breath as almost everyone gave up something they believed in for the cause of peace.

This stuff is complicated. I used to love a good rant about it. Shooting your mouth off before you knew anything was part of the attraction of rock and roll. I used to think that being heard was the most useful thing I could do, maybe because it was the only thing I really knew how to do.

But at some point it reached diminishing returns. I remember Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, with raised eyebrow, asking with exasperation, “What is it this time, Bono? Rock Against Bad Things?”

I still have a fondness for symbolic or poetic acts—a fist in the air, a shout, an indelible image. I still think they’re important. But for over two decades I’ve opted for more activism and less symbolism. A petition for something utterly worthy arrives once a month at our house. But I’m not much of a signer. These days I’m more inclined to be specific than dramatic, to organize than agonize.

On the barricades this word might sound like a yawn, but now all I want to be is an actualist (I thought I’d made the word up until I found it in the dictionary). I suppose being an actualist means being an idealist crossed with a pragmatist. I want to know what actually works. If I throw a punch, I want it to actually land. I enjoyed the wild swings of my youth. But now I’m excited by the strategy and tactics that might put injustice on the back foot.

And actually, in the end, it’s not personalities—as dull or luminous as singers can be—that change things. It’s movements like Jubilee 2000 or the ONE Campaign, which takes to the streets but also to the corridors of Capitol Hill and parliaments and G8 meetings, working with people who disagree on everything but the one thing (see what I did there?), cutting deals where they can to fight the injustice of extreme poverty. It’s also the animating idea of (RED), a gateway drug for AIDS activism, a way to bring the capitalists on board (and that was before I realized I was one).

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.