3 of my passions appear in this photo-Bono/ U2; spotting the Lance Armstrong Foundation Wear Yellow wristband raising funds & awareness in the fight against Cancer; The One Campaign fighting the war on AIDS...The ONE Campaign to fight AIDS and extreme poverty seeks to show the power of one by asking one individual at a time to write one letter, send one email, or make one phone call to his or her representatives. ONE is about building a grass-roots effort of individuals who will have one loud, collective voice calling out for full funding promised for global AIDS initiatives and, eventually, lead to America committing one more percent of its federal budget toward fighting AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa.
DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), the organization co-founded by Bono in 2001, has joined with several other groups, including the Better Safer World Coalition , Bread for the World , and the Global Health Council among others, to launch and promote The ONE Campaign.
“I’m excited about an idea today,” Bono continued. “I’m excited about the idea that we can be the generation that rids the world of extreme poverty. We, literally, can be that generation. That’s extraordinary.”
quoting Leviticus 25.10 — ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants’ and we stand together in this moment, all of us here, hoping that that liberty — an ideal which we don’t even always live up to at home, we all know that, that that liberty can spread and become a place of love and safety and openness for the whole world no matter how many races, no matter how many religions, no matter what our sexual identity, no matter what our gender — that we need to be one, together, to bring compassion into this world.”
“In Washington DC there is a monument to another war on the Washington Mall and ascribed upon that monument are the names of the 58,000 men and women who died over the ten years of the Vietnam War. 58,000 men and women, but to memorialize the victims of AIDS, we would need to build a Vietnam memorial every single week, 52 weeks a year and we would soon run out of room in Washington to hold the monuments. The real weapon of mass destruction at work in our world today is AIDS, and we need to get angry about it and we need to do something about it. One voice, one goal to fight global AIDS and poverty. To reach out in our American spirit of generosity and compassion that the American people have been known for for so many years, to help the poor, to help the sick, to help the oppressed, and to do what we know is right.
How can one person change the world? According to Bono, “One person, one petition, one phone call to Congress, one letter to a president, one email to friends. It starts with one person, one action, and it starts growing, building momentum, multiplying its power one by one.”