A Time for Miracles. . . an essay by Bono

I was reading the April 2 edition of Time Magazine.  I usually start with the short, easy to read articles, then move on to the larger ones.  This edition’s cover was “why we should teach the Bible in public school.”  I still haven’t read the article.  Mainly because I started at the back and read an essay by Bono on the West’s responsibility toward its neighbors.

“There’s an Irish word, meitheal.  It means that the people of the village help one another out most when the work is the hardest.  Most Europeans are like that.  As individual nations, we may argue over the garden fence, but when a neighbor’s house goes up in flames, we pull together and put out the fire.  History suggests it sometimes takes an emergency for us to draw closer.  Looking inward won’t cut it.  As a professional navel gazer, I recommend against that form of therapy for anything other than songwriting.  We discover who we are in service to one another, not the self.

 Today many rooms in our neighbor’s house, Africa, are in flames.  From the genocide in Darfur to the deathbeds in Kigali, with six AIDS patients stacked onto one cot, from the child dying of malaria to the village without clean water, conditions in Africa are a affront to every value we Europeans have ever seen fit to put on paper.  We see in Somalia and Sudan what happens if more militant forces fill the void and stir dissent within what is, for the most part, a pro-Western and moderate Muslim population.  So whether as a moral or strategic imperative, it’s folly to let this fire rage.”

The rest of the essay is an interesting read, providing some thought-provoking challenges.