[00:00:02] Because We Can, We Must - 英语演讲
[00:00:06] Commencement Address by Bono
[00:00:09] at University of Pennsylvania
[00:00:12] My name is Bono and I am a rock star.
[00:00:16] Don't get me too excited because
[00:00:19] I use four letter words when I get excited.
[00:00:21] I'd just like to say to the parents,
[00:00:24] your children are safe, your country is safe,
[00:00:27] the FCC has taught me a lesson
[00:00:30] and the only four letter word
[00:00:32] I'm going to use today is P-E-N-N.
[00:00:35] Come to think of it, “Bono” is a four-letter word.
[00:00:39] The whole business of obscenity -
[00:00:42] I don't think there's anything certainly more unseemly
[00:00:45] than the sight of a rock star in academic robes.
[00:00:48] It's a bit like when people put their King Charles
[00:00:51] spaniels in little tartan sweats and hats.
[00:00:54] It's not natural, and it doesn't make the dog any smarter.
[00:00:58] It's true we were here before with U2
[00:01:03] and I would like to thank them for giving me a great life,
[00:01:06] as well as you. I've got a great rock
[00:01:09] and roll band that normally stand in the back
[00:01:12] when I'm talking to thousands of people
[00:01:14] in a football stadium and they were here with me,
[00:01:17] I think it was seven years ago.
[00:01:21] Actually then I was with some other sartorial problems.
[00:01:23] I was wearing a mirror-ball suit
[00:01:26] at the time and I emerged from a forty-foot high revolving lemon.
[00:01:29] It was sort of a cross between a space ship,
[00:01:32] a disco and a plastic fruit.
[00:01:34] I guess it was at that point
[00:01:38] when your Trustees decided to give me their highest honor.
[00:01:41] Doctor of Laws, wow! I know it's an honor,
[00:01:46] and it really is an honor, but are you sure?
[00:01:49] Doctor of Law, all I can think about
[00:01:53] is the laws I've broken - laws of nature,
[00:01:56] laws of physics, laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,
[00:02:00] and on a memorable night in the late seventies,
[00:02:03] I think it was Newton's law of motion...sickness.
[00:02:06] No, it's true, my resume reads like a rap sheet.
[00:02:11] I have to come clean. I've broken a lot of laws,
[00:02:15] and the ones I haven't I've certainly thought about.
[00:02:18] God forgive me. Actually God forgave me.
[00:02:23] I'm here getting a doctorate, getting respectable,
[00:02:26] getting in the good graces of the powers that be.
[00:02:29] So I humbly accept the honor,
[00:02:33] keeping in mind the words of a British playwright,
[00:02:37] John Mortimer it was, "No brilliance is needed in the law.
[00:02:40] Nothing but common sense and relatively clean fingernails."
[00:02:44] Well at best I've got one of the two of those.
[00:02:49] I studied rock and roll and I grew up in Dublin in the 70s,
[00:02:55] music was an alarm bell for me, it woke me up to the world.
[00:03:00] I was 17 when I first saw The Clash,
[00:03:03] and it just sounded like revolution.
[00:03:06] The Clash were like, "This is a public service announcement -
[00:03:10] with guitars." I was the kid in the crowd
[00:03:14] who took it at face value.
[00:03:15] Later I learned that a lot of the rebels
[00:03:18] were in it for the T-shirt.
[00:03:20] I didn't expect change to come so slow,
[00:03:24] so agonizingly slow.
[00:03:26] I didn't realize that the biggest obstacle
[00:03:29] to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons,
[00:03:33] or the Establishment, it was something much more subtle.
[00:03:36] As the Provost just referred to,
[00:03:39] a combination of our own indifference
[00:03:42] and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of those
[00:03:45] you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy.
[00:03:48] So for better or worse that was my education.
[00:03:54] I came away with a clear sense of the difference
[00:03:58] music could make in my own life,
[00:04:00] in other people's lives if I did my job right.
[00:04:03] Which if you're a singer in a rock band means
[00:04:06] avoiding the obvious pitfalls like, say, a mullet hairdo.
[00:04:11] If anyone here doesn't know what a mullet
[00:04:14] is by the way your education's certainly not complete,
[00:04:18] I'd ask for your money back. For a lead singer like me,
[00:04:22] a mullet is, I would suggest, arguably more dangerous
[00:04:25] than a drug problem. Yes, I had a mullet in the 80s.
[00:04:30] Now this is the point where the members of the faculty
[00:04:34] start smiling uncomfortably and thinking maybe
[00:04:37] they should have offered me the honorary bachelors
[00:04:39] degree instead of the full blown doctorate -
[00:04:42] he should have been the bachelor's one,
[00:04:45] he's talking about mullets and stuff.
[00:04:47] If they're asking what on earth I'm doing here,
[00:04:50] I think it's a fair question. What am I doing here?
[00:04:54] More to the point - what are you doing here?
[00:04:57] Because if you don't mind me saying so
[00:05:00] this is a strange ending to an Ivy League education.
[00:05:04] Four years in these historic halls thinking great thoughts
[00:05:08] and now you're sitting in a stadium better
[00:05:11] suited for football listening to an Irish rock star
[00:05:13] give a speech that is so far mostly about himself.
[00:05:16] What are you doing here?
[00:05:18] Actually I saw something in the paper last week
[00:05:22] about Kermit the Frog giving a commencement address somewhere.
[00:05:26] One of the students was complaining,
[00:05:29] "I worked my ass off for four years to be addressed by a sock?"
[00:05:33] You have worked your ass off for this.
[00:05:36] For four years you've been buying, trading, and selling,
[00:05:40] everything you've got in this marketplace of ideas.
[00:05:43] The intellectual hustle.
[00:05:45] Your pockets are full, even if your parents' are empty,
[00:05:48] and now you've got to figure out what to spend it on.
[00:05:52] Well, the going rate for change is not cheap.
[00:05:57] Big ideas are expensive.
[00:05:59] The University has had its share of big ideas.
[00:06:02] Benjamin Franklin had a few,
[00:06:05] so did Justice Brennen and in my opinion so does Judith Rodin.
[00:06:10] What a gorgeous girl. They all knew
[00:06:15] that if you're gonna be good at your word,
[00:06:17] if you're gonna live up to your ideals and your education,
[00:06:19] it's gonna cost you.
[00:06:20] So my question I suppose is: What's the big idea?
[00:06:26] What's your big idea? What are you willing to
[00:06:31] spend your moral capital, your intellectual capital,
[00:06:34] your cash, your sweat equity in pursuing
[00:06:38] outside of the walls of the University of Pennsylvania?
[00:06:41] There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly,
[00:06:47] and he has this epic poem called The Book of Judas,
[00:06:51] and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind,
[00:06:54] it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it."
[00:06:58] What does that mean to betray the age?
[00:07:02] Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits,
[00:07:09] it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes.
[00:07:12] It means telling the secrets of the age
[00:07:15] and facing harsher truths.
[00:07:17] Every age has its massive moral blind spots.
[00:07:21] We might not see them, but our children will.
[00:07:25] Slavery was one of them and the people
[00:07:29] who best served that age were the ones
[00:07:32] who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman.
[00:07:35] Benjamin Franklin called it what it was
[00:07:38] when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
[00:07:41] Segregation. There was another one.
[00:07:46] America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement
[00:07:50] to betray their age. And 50 years ago
[00:07:54] the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954,
[00:08:00] Brown vs. Board of Education came down
[00:08:04] and put the lie to the idea that separate
[00:08:06] can ever really be equal.
[00:08:07] Fast forward 50 years. What are the ideas right
[00:08:13] now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?
[00:08:17] What are the blind spots of our age?
[00:08:20] What's worth spending your post-Penn lives
[00:08:25] trying to do or undo? It might be something simple.
[00:08:28] It might be something as simple
[00:08:31] as our deep down refusal to believe
[00:08:33] that every human life has equal worth.
[00:08:35] Could that be it? Could that be it?
[00:08:38] Each of you will probably have your own answer,
[00:08:42] but for me that is it.
[00:08:43] And for me the proving ground has been Africa.
[00:08:46] Africa makes a mockery of what we say,
[00:08:51] at least what I say, about equality
[00:08:54] and questions our pieties and our commitments
[00:08:57] because there's no way to look at
[00:09:00] what's happening over there
[00:09:02] and it's effect on all of us and conclude
[00:09:04] that we actually consider Africans
[00:09:07] as our equals before God.
[00:09:07] There is no chance.
[00:09:09] An amazing event happened here
[00:09:12] in Philadelphia in 1985 - Live Aid -
[00:09:16] that whole We Are the World phenomenon
[00:09:19] the concert that happened here.
[00:09:21] Well after that concert I went to
[00:09:23] Ethiopia with my wife, Ali.
[00:09:26] We were there for a month
[00:09:28] and an extraordinary thing happened to me.
[00:09:30] We used to wake up in the morning
[00:09:33] and the mist would be lifting we'd see
[00:09:36] thousands and thousands of people
[00:09:37] who'd been walking all night to
[00:09:39] our food station were we were working.
[00:09:41] One man - I was standing outside talking to the translator -
[00:09:45] had this beautiful boy
[00:09:47] and he was saying to me in Amharic,
[00:09:50] I think it was, I said I can't understand
[00:09:52] what he's saying, and this nurse
[00:09:54] who spoke English and Amharic said to me,
[00:09:57] he's saying will you take his son.
[00:09:59] He's saying please take his son,
[00:10:02] he would be a great son for you.
[00:10:04] I was looking puzzled and he said,
[00:10:08] "You must take my son because
[00:10:10] if you don't take my son, my son will surely die.
[00:10:13] If you take him he will go back to
[00:10:16] Ireland and get an education."
[00:10:18] Probably like the ones we're talking about today.
[00:10:20] I had to say no, that was the rules there
[00:10:25] and I walked away from that man,
[00:10:27] I've never really walked away from it.
[00:10:30] But I think about that boy and
[00:10:32] that man and that's when I started this journey
[00:10:35] that's brought me here into this stadium.
[00:10:37] Because at that moment I became the worst scourge
[00:10:41] on God's green earth, a rock star with a cause.
[00:10:45] Christ! Except it isn't the cause.
[00:10:49] Seven thousand Africans dying every day of preventable,
[00:10:52] treatable disease like AIDS?
[00:10:54] That's not a cause, that's an emergency.
[00:10:57] And when the disease gets out of control
[00:11:00] because most of the population live on
[00:11:02] less than one dollar a day?
[00:11:04] That's not a cause, that's an emergency.
[00:11:07] And when resentment builds because of
[00:11:11] unfair trade rules and the burden of unfair debt,
[00:11:13] that are debts by the way that keep Africans poor?
[00:11:17] That's not a cause, that's an emergency.
[00:11:20] So, we Are the World, Live Aid, start me off
[00:11:26] it was an extraordinary thing and really
[00:11:28] that event was about charity.
[00:11:30] But 20 years on I'm not that interested in charity.
[00:11:35] I'm interested in justice.
[00:11:37] There's a difference.
[00:11:39] Africa needs justice as much as it needs charity.
[00:11:42] Equality for Africa is a big idea.
[00:11:47] It's a big expensive idea.
[00:11:50] I see the Wharton graduates now getting out
[00:11:53] the math on the back of their programs,
[00:11:55] numbers are intimidating, aren't they?
[00:11:57] But not to you!
[00:11:59] But the scale of the suffering
[00:12:01] and the scope of the commitment
[00:12:03] they often numb us into a kind of indifference.
[00:12:06] Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty
[00:12:10] in Africa is like wishing
[00:12:12] that gravity didn't make things so damn heavy.
[00:12:14] We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about it?
[00:12:18] Well, more than we think.
[00:12:23] We can't fix every problem -
[00:12:24] corruption, natural calamities
[00:12:27] are part of the picture here--
[00:12:29] but the ones we can we must.
[00:12:31] The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade,
[00:12:35] as I say, sharing our knowledge,
[00:12:39] the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs
[00:12:42] in a crisis, we can do that.
[00:12:44] And because we can, we must.
[00:12:47] Because we can, we must.
[00:12:51] This is the straight truth, the righteous truth.
[00:12:55] It's not a theory, it's a fact.
[00:12:58] The fact is that this generation - yours, my generation -
[00:13:03] that can look at the poverty,
[00:13:05] we're the first generation that can look at
[00:13:08] poverty and disease, look across the ocean
[00:13:10] to Africa and say with a straight face,
[00:13:13] we can be the first to end this sort of
[00:13:16] stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty,
[00:13:20] a child can die for lack of food in it's belly.
[00:13:23] We can be the first generation.
[00:13:26] It might take a while,
[00:13:28] but we can be that generation
[00:13:30] that says no to stupid poverty.
[00:13:32] It's a fact, the economists confirm it.
[00:13:37] It's an expensive fact but, cheaper
[00:13:40] than say the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from fascism.
[00:13:43] And cheaper I would argue than fighting wave
[00:13:47] after wave of terrorism's new recruits.
[00:13:50] That's the economics department over there, very good.
[00:13:53] It's a fact. So why aren't we pumping our fists
[00:13:59] in the air and cheering about it?
[00:14:01] Well probably because when we admit
[00:14:04] we can do something about it,
[00:14:05] we've got to do something about it.
[00:14:08] For the first time in history we have the know how,
[00:14:11] we have the cash, we have the lifesaving drugs,
[00:14:14] but do we have the will?
[00:14:16] Yesterday, here in Philadelphia, at the Liberty Bell,
[00:14:22] I met a lot of Americans who do have the will.
[00:14:25] From arch-religious conservatives to young secular radicals,
[00:14:31] I just felt an incredible overpowering sense
[00:14:34] that this was possible.
[00:14:35] We're calling it the ONE campaign,
[00:14:38] to put an end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa.
[00:14:42] They believe we can do it, so do I.
[00:14:46] I really, really do believe it.
[00:14:51] I just want you to know, I think this is obvious,
[00:14:55] but I'm not really going in for the warm fuzzy feeling thing,
[00:14:58] I'm not a hippy, I do not have flowers in my hair,
[00:15:02] I come from punk rock,
[00:15:04] The Clash wore army boots not Birkenstocks.
[00:15:07] I believe America can do this!
[00:15:10] I believe that this generation can do this.
[00:15:13] In fact I want to hear an argument about why we shouldn't.
[00:15:17] I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now,
[00:15:23] you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation,
[00:15:27] the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke.
[00:15:31] I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this,
[00:15:34] outside this campus - and even inside it -
[00:15:38] idealism is under siege beset by materialism,
[00:15:42] narcissism and all the other isms of indifference,
[00:15:47] baggism, shaggism, raggism, notism, graduationism, chismism.
[00:15:53] I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him.
[00:15:56] But I don't want to make you cop to idealism,
[00:16:00] not in front of your parents, or your younger siblings.
[00:16:03] But what about Americanism?
[00:16:06] Will you cop to that at least?
[00:16:08] It's not everywhere in fashion these days, Americanism.
[00:16:11] Not very big in Europe, truth be told.
[00:16:14] No less on Ivy League college campuses.
[00:16:18] But it all depends on your definition of Americanism.
[00:16:21] Me, I'm in love with this country called America.
[00:16:27] I'm a huge fan of America,
[00:16:29] I'm one of those annoying fans,
[00:16:31] you know the ones that read the CD notes
[00:16:34] and follow you into bathrooms
[00:16:35] and ask you all kinds of annoying questions
[00:16:37] about why you didn't live up to that?
[00:16:39] I'm that kind of fan.
[00:16:41] I read the Declaration of Independence
[00:16:43] and I've read the Constitution of the United States,
[00:16:46] and they are some liner notes, dude.
[00:16:49] As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage
[00:16:53] to Independence Hall, and I love America
[00:16:56] because America is not just a country,
[00:16:58] it's an idea. You see my country, Ireland,
[00:17:02] is a great country, but it's not an idea.
[00:17:05] America is an idea, but it's an idea
[00:17:09] that brings with it some baggage,
[00:17:11] like power brings responsibility.
[00:17:13] It's an idea that brings with it equality,
[00:17:17] but equality even though it's the highest calling,
[00:17:21] is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible,
[00:17:26] that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America.
[00:17:28] It's like hey, look there's the moon up there,
[00:17:33] lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it.
[00:17:36] That's the kind of America that I'm a fan of.
[00:17:38] In 1771 your founder Mr. Franklin spent three months
[00:17:44] in Ireland and Scotland to look at the relationship
[00:17:47] they had with England to see if this could be
[00:17:50] a model for America, whether America should
[00:17:52] follow their example and remain a part of the British Empire.
[00:17:56] Franklin was deeply, deeply distressed by what he saw.
[00:18:01] In Ireland he saw how England had put
[00:18:05] a stranglehold on Irish trade,
[00:18:07] how absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers
[00:18:12] and how those farmers in Franklin's words
[00:18:15] "lived in retched hovels of mud and straw,
[00:18:18] were clothed in rags and subsisted chiefly on potatoes."
[00:18:22] Not exactly the American dream....
[00:18:25] So instead of Ireland becoming a model for America,
[00:18:30] America became a model for Ireland in
[00:18:33] our own struggle for independence.
[00:18:35] When the potatoes ran out, millions of Irish men,
[00:18:39] women and children packed their bags got on a boat
[00:18:44] and showed up right here. And we're still doing it.
[00:18:47] We're not even starving anymore, loads of potatoes.
[00:18:49] In fact if there's any Irish out there,
[00:18:54] I've breaking news from Dublin, the potato famine
[00:18:57] is over you can come home now.
[00:18:59] But why are we still showing up?
[00:19:02] Because we love the idea of America.
[00:19:05] We love the crackle and the hustle,
[00:19:09] we love the spirit that gives the finger to fate,
[00:19:12] the spirit that says there's no hurdle
[00:19:15] we can't clear and no problem we can't fix.
[00:19:18] (sound of helicopter) Oh, here comes the Brits,
[00:19:21] only joking. No problem we can't fix.
[00:19:24] So what's the problem that we want to
[00:19:26] apply all this energy and intellect to?
[00:19:29] Every era has its defining struggle
[00:19:33] and the fate of Africa is one of ours.
[00:19:36] It's not the only one, but in the history books
[00:19:40] it's easily going to make the top five,
[00:19:42] what we did or what we did not do.
[00:19:46] It's a proving ground, as I said earlier,
[00:19:49] for the idea of equality.
[00:19:51] But whether it's this or something else,
[00:19:54] I hope you'll pick a fight and get in it.
[00:19:57] Get your boots dirty, get rough,
[00:20:00] steel your courage with a final drink there at Smoky Joe's,
[00:20:05] one last primal scream and go.
[00:20:07] Sing the melody line you hear in your own head,
[00:20:12] remember, you don't owe anybody any explanations,
[00:20:16] you don't owe your parents any explanations,
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