BONO

What would be easier for you at this point, giving up U2 or your anti-poverty work?

I can't live without music. I don't think I physically could live without music, because it's the thing that allows me to feel normal. It's like asking a psychotic person to do without their lithium, OK? [Laughs]

But there are people out there whose lives are dependent on people like me who have access to agents of change, and I would have to take a big, deep breath before I gave that up. What I'm hoping is that the social movement that is growing around our issues will be so strong that in the event of somebody like me not being around they won't notice. In the end, social movements carry the day, not rock stars.

Thirteen hundred campuses have signed on to our One Campaign - as part of our Millennium Development Goals, getting the world's wealthiest nations to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. Those college kids are redefining their country through the prism of the fight against poverty. Issues like that afford a chance to America to redescribe itself to the world. But they also afford America a chance to redescribe itself to its citizens. That's what's going on.

What do you mean?

People are nauseous about being perceived as the enemy. After Abu Ghraib, reasonable, rational people were saying the most despicable things about America. Imagine that. The country that not only liberated Europe but rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan. The country of Omaha Beach. The heroism of people who gave their lives for people like my dad. I mean, this is the United States of America.

And, by the way, whoever fixes that problem gets elected. People say, "Oh, it's all about the economy." This is the first time it's not. It's about turning that idea around. We're the United States of America, and we do not like being seen as the enemy.

And it's a wave. I think the next generation is going to roll right over us. There's a new kind of hard-headed idealism out there, which is not about "Let's hold hands and wish away the world's problems." People are ready to change the world one brick at a time. I really believe that.

What can that idealism produce?

It is utterly accepted in the U.S. and Europe that you cannot live a life of peace and prosperity if at the end of your avenue there are hungry people without clean water, losing their children because they cannot access a twenty-cent vaccine or dying for the lack of drugs we have falling out of our medicine cabinets.

So, some optimistic thoughts: In the near future, distance will no longer decide who your neighbor is. It will be accepted that the slums of Kibera, Kenya, the rural poverty of Lalibela, Ethiopia, the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, are at the end of our lane. In the not-too-distant future, the anopheles mosquito will be all but chased off the planet, saving 3,000 children's lives that right now are lost to malaria every day in Africa.

In the not-too-distant future, the rich world will invest in the education of the poor world, because it is our best protection against young minds being twisted by extremist ideologies - or growing up without any ideology at all, which could be worse. Nature abhors a vacuum; terrorism loves one.

Has your activism affected how you think about being in U2? I've spent a lot of time in these two-dimensional worlds - numbers, values, analysis of statistics. And when I get away from it, being with U2 is such a playground. It's made me realize how sacred music is. It's a kind of sacrament - like marriage, like friendship. I'm not sure the other three in the band know this, because they - maybe sensibly - have avoided that other world. They just think they're in U2, and that's great. But I really know how great it is to be in U2.