Persons of the Year

Excerpt from the recent issue of Time Magazine:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are the Time's Persons of the year.

The Gates commitment acts as a catalyst. [Gates and his wife's pledge to the Gates foundation will increase it's endowment to nearly $32 billion, by far the largest foundation in the world. The foundation gave $1 billion to world health this year alone and gave out $3.35 billion in grants in 2004]. They needed the drug companies to come on board, and the major health agencies, the churches, the universities and a whole generation of politicians who were raised to believe that foreign aid was about as politically sexy as postal reform. And that is where Bono's campaign comes in/ He goes to churches and talks of Christ and the lepers, citing exactly how many passages of scripture (2,103) deal with taking care of the poor; he sits in a corporate boardroom and talks about the role of aid in reviving the U.S. brand. He gets Pat Roberston and Susan Sarandon to do a commercial together for his ONE Campaign to "Make Poverty History". Then he heads to Washington, where he stops by a meeting of House Democrats to nuzzle them about debt relief before a private lunch with President George W. Bush, whom he praises for tripling aid to Africa over the past four years....[Senator Jesse Helms] "I had met enough well-known people to quickly figure out who was genuine and who was there for show. I knew as soon as I met Bono that he was genuine. he has absolutely nothing to gain personally as a result of his work. In fact, he has opened himself to criticism because he has been willing to work with anyone to find help for these children who have taken his heart."

This is not about pity. It's more about passion. Pity sees suffering and wants to ease the pain; passion sees injustice and wants to settle the score. Pity implores the powerful to pay attention; passion warns them about what will happen if they don't. The risk of pity is that it kills with kindness; the promise of passion is that it builds on the hope that the poor are fully capable of helping themselves if given the chance. In 2005 the world's poor needed no more condolences; they needed people to get interested, get mad, and then get to work.

I cannot stress enough how fantastic this issue of Time is. I fully admit that I am a Bono Kool-Aid Drinker, but setting that aside this issue really takes apart the reasons, methods, and efforts that these three people are making to end "stupid poverty." It is amazing how God is using the obscenely rich and grandiose to reach out to the obscenely poor and forgotten. I promise that if you get this issue, you will be inspired and moved by the vision and work of these three people.