He’s not just animated; he's angry. Because he knows that a lot of the Crisis in the developingworld can be avoided. Staring at people queuing up to die three to a bed, two on top and one underneath, in a hospital just outside of Lilongwe, Malawi, and knowing this doesn’t have to be so is too much for most of us. I am crushed. He is creative. He’s an economist who can bring to life statistics that were, after all, lives in the first place. He can look up from the numbers and see faces through the spreadsheets, families like his own that stick together on treks to the far ends of the world. He helps us make sense of what senseless really means: fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventa- ble, treatable diseases—AIDS, malaria, TB—for lack of drugs that we take for granted.
This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality. What is happening in Africa mocks our pieties. doubts our concern, and questions our commitment to that whole concept. Because if we're honest, there’s no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Certainly not in North America, or Europe, or Japan. An entire continent bursting into flames? Deep down, if we really accept that their lives—African lives—are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It's an uncomfortable truth."
(Bono writing about "Jeff" in Forward of, The End Of Poverty. Jeffery Sachs)
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