Without Borders | Got a good cause? Get a celebrity

Celebrity has its perks. You can jet anywhere, stay in the finest hotels, eat the most delicious food.

Everybody knows you - so much so that simply catching a glimpse can make a tired working stiff's day. Just ask the crowd that packed the Inquirer building's lobby Thursday when rock star Bono visited Philadelphia to collect the Liberty Medal.

It's popularity. It's curiosity. It's celebrity.

It's power.

Bono has power. He - and other celebrities of substance - use it to help push humanitarian crises from the periphery of American public interest toward the center.

These crises were stranded at the periphery of the world's attention from 1975 through 1979 when Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge slaughtered and starved about 1.7 million Cambodians - 21 percent of that Southeast Asian nation's population. They were at the periphery in 1994 when Rwanda exploded in quick-time genocide that required only 90 days to take as many as 1 million lives.

Malaria and tuberculosis, even something as preventable as diarrhea, have been killers for decades with only humanitarian geeks taking note, let alone taking action.

But that has changed. There has been a roaring reaction to the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, to the maliciousness of HIV/AIDS, and to the lack of clean water. Social consciousness is in.

Bono is a big reason why.

People love stars. Their prominence makes them larger than life, and their wealth gives them the wherewithal to visit places where hardship is the norm. Fame gives celebrities a platform - and makes them a target of insults.

"People think all kinds of things. They think you're egocentric," Bono said. "I would think that's obvious if you're a singer in a rock band."

UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, is well-known for its celebrity goodwill ambassadors. Entertainer Danny Kaye was the first celebrity to pitch UNICEF's cause, from 1954 until he died in 1987. If you are of the age to remember Kaye, you also probably recall actress Audrey Hepburn following in his footsteps.

Today, singer Angelique Kidjo and soccer star David Beckham are among UNICEF's celebrity representatives. Angelina Jolie is a media magnet when she travels to hot spots as a representative for UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency.

The savvy ground-level activist today gets a celebrity to do for its cause what Princess Diana did to raise the profile on land mines, and Bob Geldof did on human rights and world hunger.

But no one has done it better than Bono. He is a student of the most vexing threats that haunt Africa: HIV/AIDS and poverty. Activism is his second full-time job.

"I don't even consider myself a celebrity anymore on this," he said Thursday.

Bono, 47, belts out statistics as though they were song lyrics: About 20 million African children are going to school who otherwise wouldn't be able to because debt cancellation has allowed governments (the responsible ones, anyhow) to make education more accessible.

He knows the reality behind the numbers, too.

Yes, the leaders of the G8 industrialized nations pledged more money for African assistance at their 2005 gathering. Pressure to provide more aid came in part from consciousness-raising Live Eight concerts, including one in Philadelphia, that Bono and others staged just before the G8 summit. Funding has increased since then, but most countries are lagging behind in their pledges.

The United States is the most generous nation in the world, thanks to the governmental and philanthropic sectors, when it comes to humanitarian contributions. President Bush has boosted aid and been an eloquent advocate himself on behalf of some of the world's most vulnerable people.

But while the United States ranks high among nations in the raw amount of money it gives, it scores poorly when calculated on a per-capita basis - the truest way to measure if we are giving according to our ability. Bono and many others want to increase the tiny slice of the U.S. budget that goes to helping deeply poor countries.

Raising our humanitarian profile around the world not only is the morally decent thing to do, it's also a way to help repair America's international image and rebuild global relations that have become strained during the Bush administration.

Bono and his international organization, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), plan to talk to 2008 presidential candidates and prove that there is some "wind at their back" when they support programs to reduce HIV/AIDS and ease African poverty. His goal: to foster a movement. Only then, Bono says, will the causes he advocates have real political might.