Message of the Day: Hunger, Disease, Economic Opportunity, Human Rights, War, Environment, Population, Personal Growth
Live Aid, July 13, 1985, BBC “Live Aid, Against All Odds”, 2005
The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Three
We continue to look backward and forward in our reflection on how history has, in an ongoing process, moved backward and forward simultaneously in terms of progress, bringing us to the current crossroads in the history of civilization.
As noted in previous posts, our initial documentary film on world hunger catalyzed a White House policy that nearly changed the world in the most far-reaching manner. It could have delivered on FDR’s promise of a second bill of rights after World War Two for America and the world, the world revolution Dr. King called for and warned would happen one way or another, and the natural imperative of both basic needs and rights for everyone moved toward, by turns incrementally and explosively in the face of regression, throughout history. It moved things forward importantly, but it failed at what could have happened. Many things influenced the outcome and what has happened since. We will continue with that.
Now, we focus on one of the enormous steps forward.
The time was the mid-eighties.
In some ways the world seemed closer to nuclear war between the US and allies and Soviet Union and allies than since the Cuban Missile Crisis, over two decades earlier. The Cold War bipolar world in which there were two superpowers capable of destroying each other and the planet seemed as if it was a permanent reality. However, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had told the world on BBC (and US President Ronald Reagan directly) after meeting with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev, that the West could do business with him. Hope was on the horizon.
The anti-apartheid movement in the US and Western nations was growing, regardless of the Cold War alignments by governments. Cold War related conflicts in Africa, Central and South America, and elsewhere, led to atrocities on all sides, and invariably had deeper underlying causes of hunger, poverty, control of land and resources and all the usual issues surrounding inequality. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was just over-halfway through its decade-long, history-changing impact.
The scope of the AIDS pandemic was still unfolding. It was considered a gay disease because of US experience, even after the CDC in 1984 reported that women contracted the disease as well. Homophobia and fear of the disease were still prevalent, but the movement to change this and to find treatment to stop it from being a death sentence was gaining momentum. The fact that the disease was mainly impacting Africa and mainly transmitted through heterosexuals, effecting women as well as men, was not yet in focus. Much less the scope of the pandemic which did, and still could, threaten the entire species, with all the progress made. There are approximately 37 million people currently living with HIV-AIDS and over a million a year dying from it.
Environmental issues were a mainstream concern, but the issue of climate change was virtually unknown, although that was about to change.
Progress was being made in basic needs and economic inequality in much of the developing world, but still only to a point. In the US and UK, ironically, a downward spiral to this moment of economic inequality was in its beginning years, unrecognized generally at the time.
The ethos of the time in the US, spilling over with its economic and cultural influence elsewhere, was increasingly focused on personal gain and gratification.
This is just a brief overview for context.
Everything was in flux.
A moment occurred on October 23, 1984, when the airwaves were permeated by a BBC report, topping even network reports in the US, of the most horrific images of famine and starvation, especially of children, in Africa, never before viewed on such a scale.
Which led to an indisputably world-changing event in the historical collective genes.
Three years ago, yesterday, we posted a piece, updated twice, on the 30thanniversary of the Live Aid concert in London and Philadelphia, broadcast live worldwide on television and radio, to the largest audience in human history.
It speaks for itself.
7.14.15:
(TWO UPDATES BELOW):
Thirty years ago, yesterday, the Live Aid concert and broadcast changed the world.
On July 13, 1985, the most extraordinary global broadcast in human history in many ways occurred–of the Live Aid concert for famine relief in Africa, specifically Ethiopia, and addressing the issue of world hunger in general.
We were deeply involved through the use in the Live Aid TV and radio broadcasts of the information from our first film on hunger, “The Hungry Planet”, which led to the White House Hunger Working Group and an enormous change in attitude and approach to developmental aid to end hunger, and a second film, “I Want To Live”, produced with the late John Denver, who became involved because of our first film.
On TV, between music sets, celebrities appeared saying that hunger could be ended, that there was more than enough food, that all the interrelated problems of could be addressed, that many things that had seemed impossible in human history, like going to the moon, had been done. They would read short but searing and informational statements—such as: “Every year, 13 to 18 million people, mostly infants and children, die from hunger.”
As we have described at length often, this went to the heart of why hunger was the first focus of our work for so many years. It was the worst ongoing killer in history and as much as all the other great problems facing humanity were related and critical—the hungry child was the one unifying theme in an otherwise polarized world about most issues.
Live Aid was the next step in global consciousness required to get us where we are today, cutting these deaths in half or more—still an incomprehensible evil when there is more than enough to feed everyone (and the resources to deal with related disease causing these deaths as well), with the knowledge largely in hand to create successful sustainable development and resources a matter of political will—but still an enormous accomplishment in the effort to end hunger and millions of childhood deaths from hunger and disease every year.
Furthermore, we would now put the rights of children, period, starting with the youngest, to be free from abuse, neglect or denied any basic needs, including food, as the center of changing the world—and of bringing consciousness to the other great problems which all impact each other and must all be addressed together.
And Live Aid took an evolutionary step towards what this ultimately requires and means as well—seeing and experiencing each other as one people on one planet with the same basic values and goals, who urgently must and can change the world.
Going to the moon did this by seeing ourselves from the point of view of the universe. Live Aid did it from the point of view of being on earth together as a family responding to the needs of the most vulnerable with our hearts and souls on fire–music fueling the fire, pictures of the children fueling the fire, and the broadcast spreading the fire to the whole human family, all having the same experience at the same moment.
Live Aid took our anthem at World Campaign to being a global experience:
We Are One.
During the concert, literally, we had the epiphany that hatched our next project—The Campaign To End Hunger—as the necessary ongoing follow-up to a one day miracle in Live Aid and documentary films that had huge impact, but that under the best of circumstances would never be seen, or by definition continuously focused on, by most people.
So how to keep and build the momentum? By an ongoing global public service advertising campaign seen by more people than had ever been reached in the most continuous way possible, on TV (and radio and print) to keep people educated and motivated to act.
And just in time, a new concept that also changed the world, CNN, a 24-7 news channel created in 1980, was gaining traction, and the promise from creator-owner Ted Turner to air our spots globally in a serious way, for years, was made and kept.
As by other networks and local stations. And for most of the next two decades, the Campaign To End Hunger, showing hunger, disease, population, human rights, war, and the environment as inextricably connected, reached the planet.
All things are interlinked. Just as it was Live Aid that inspired our next step, our prior work starting in the seventies helped create and deliver the message on that unforgettable summer day 30 years ago.
There were plenty of flaws with regard to the concert itself and the concept. The usual suspects of celebrity egos (the majority white men) in the equation of drugs, sex and rock n’ roll, corporate sponsors jumping in like leeches to benefit themselves with socially responsible appearance, and the questions of how funds raised for aid projects were used, among other things.
But as real and important as these flaws were, they were irrelevant in the larger scheme of things—the evolutionary moment of what occurred.
In the middle of the Me Decade Squared (the eighties), an urgent call to help others in the world was made and answered in a manner that had never been done. Concerts as fundraisers to do good? Yes, with many more to come to this day (largely because of Live Aid). But nothing like this. And the money-raising was beside the point.
The urgent call by Bob Geldof led to the unimaginable response in ten weeks to set up concerts in London and Philadelphia of the most popular music groups of the time, who all performed for free.
And the concerts were broadcast live, to at least a third of the population of the planet or more with the technology of 1985, also impossibly arranged in weeks, which brought the world together in a way never before done.
Under the banner never to be forgotten:
FEED THE WORLD.
Seventy musical acts playing live on two continents, Princess Diana and Charles sitting in Wembley next to Bob Geldof and family, the hard-bitten reporters following them, the 170,000 capacity crowds at Wembley and JFK, and the 1.5 to 2 billion people watching on 95% of the TVs on earth—crying their eyes out together at the tragedy of children dying from hunger—and the wondrous joy of coming together to end it, while some of the best, and certainly most popular, music in the world lit up their spirits.
Countless more listened on radio. Remarkably, given the digital age of communications options today, altogether, in terms of percentage of world population, Live Aid almost certainly remains the largest shared live global broadcast in history.
If you were alive and conscious, you know all about it.
If not, use the following links for a taste of what happened that day, then use the internet for what it’s good for and watch the whole thing.
Catherine McHugh gave a synopsis of events with links that led to Live Aid and from it, in “Live Aid 30th Anniversary: The Day Rock and Roll Changed the World”. Here’s an excerpt from the start of the piece in A&E’s Biography:
“Today, on the 30th anniversary of Live Aid, the event’s success in raising both awareness about the famine in Africa and money for relief programs remains staggeringly impressive.
Live Aid was staged on Saturday, July 13, 1985. About 75 different acts performed live for about 170,000 people in London and Philadelphia. Meanwhile, an estimated 1.5 billion people in 110 countries watched it via a live television stream from 13 satellites. More than 40 nations also held telethons for African famine relief during the broadcast.
In our current digital age, these numbers may seem quaint, but in 1985, there was no World Wide Web, no email, no live blogging and no Twitter. Most people still listened to music by listening to the radio or playing vinyl records and cassette tapes; compact discs (CDs) only became widely available this same year.
The event was a spectacular success…”
Bono with U2 (still going strong, like Madonna, the ubiquitous Mick Jagger and many others there that day), and Freddie Mercury with Queen (who died six years later from AIDS, one day after publicly announcing he had the disease), in two of the most iconic (the terribly overused but truly deserved word here) performances of all time. Watch the entire audience participate in unison.
The sea of people at the stadiums is just somehow different than anything you’ve ever seen, in part because you know it represented the borderless sea of people watching and participating everywhere.
Kristi York Wooten wrote a fantastic piece in The Atlantic yesterday, giving perspective to how historically important this event was and continues to be.
There are some important errors, such as the phrase “extreme poverty” (a term tied to a specific income so low as to vastly understate severe poverty, much less those without real security of basic needs) having its wide use originate later as a result of Live Aid, or of former President Carter’s ongoing involvement in development issues being linked to this, for instance. These had their origin on June 6, 1977 at the cabinet meeting where Cater announced he had seen our film and initiated a policy on hunger and related issues such as health and basic needs denied by poverty, memorialized in cabinet meeting minutes. Other critical influences by many extraordinary people and events had also occured before, converging with this moment, followed by the process of events which in turn created the fertile ground for Live Aid. The “poorest of the poor” being the focus of developmental aid was at the heart of reform started as a result of the above, suffusing national and international aid language for years before Live Aid, a process in which the term “extreme poverty” then became increasingly used. Politicians and celebrities were already increasingly on board.
But Live Aid was the next step in “movement-building”, demonstrating that building movements takes both conscientious strategic work and readiness to respond to extraordinary and unpredictable events.
And the extraordinary event of Live Aid was its own singular miracle, initiated by the perhaps still unmatched powerful broadcast journalism of Michael Buerk’s reporting and Mohammed Amin’s camera on the BBC and worldwide, and the response of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and countless women and men who answered their call for the event.
Here are some observations from Kristi York Wooten’s Atlantic article, “The Legacy of Live Aid, 30 Years Later”, July 13, 2015:
“Today, 30 years later, as famous figures continue to wield influence on social media to promote charities, Live Aid’s legacy continues to be felt in fundraising efforts and movement-building around causes.
…There would be no red noses without Live Aid, at least according to the filmmaker Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually), who co-founded Comic Relief and Red Nose Day in the 1980s after being inspired by Live Aid’s organizer Bob Geldof. ‘I remember watching [the ensemble] Band Aid and Live Aid and feeling like I should be involved, then I ended up in Ethiopia for three weeks,’ he says. ‘This was when the famine was still very bad, and I saw terrible things ‘really close up’ which changed my life completely. It led to a lifelong commitment to end extreme poverty.’
…The images of starving children in one of the poorest places on earth moved Geldof (the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats) and Midge Ure (Ultravox) to write the charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and assemble an all-star group to record it that November. After accompanying the first shipment of aid to Ethiopia funded by the sale of the song in the spring of 1985, Geldof returned home to London, determined to do more, which led to the birth of Live Aid.
…Aid is still a complicated topic, yet progress on the continent is real: The Brookings Institute reports that the share of Africans living in extreme poverty fell from 60 percent in 1996 to 47 percent in 2011 and is expected to fall to 24 percent by 2030.
The credit for these achievements belongs to African countries themselves, but Live Aid’s acolytes–including actors, musicians, doctors, aid workers, faith-based grassroots organizations, and average citizens–have played a supporting role by lobbying governments to invest in programs that help fight the root causes of poverty and save lives from preventable diseases such as AIDS and malaria.
…If Live Aid had never happened, would Richard Branson have swum with Desmond Tutu while discussing world peace? Would Ted Turner have funded mosquito net initiatives, or Bill and Melinda Gates committed their wealth to provide vaccinations and contraceptives, or Jimmy Carter spent his post-presidency trying to eradicate tropical diseases in countries like Nigeria? Would George W. Bush have enacted PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), a massive government initiative to fight AIDS/HIV around the world? Would David Cameron have devoted unprecedented amounts of money to the UK’s foreign assistance budget? It’s also easy to question whether the African schools, water wells and AIDS-awareness campaigns of Oprah, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Will.i.am, Annie Lennox, and Alicia Keys would exist today if Live Aid hadn’t set the precedent for celebrity focus on the continent.
…If a song had the power to make 1980s music fans feel like they could help ‘feed the world,’ it wasn’t because they perceived themselves as colonialists, but rather as activists, says Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who was 8 years old when Live Aid aired on the BBC in the summer of 1985. ‘I remember it,’ Martin says. ‘It made my generation feel like caring for the world was part of the remit. Rock and roll doesn’t have to be detached from society.’ After Band Aid and Live Aid transformed the purchase of records and concert tickets into meaningful charitable contributions, music became the advocacy tool of choice. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ inspired other records such as USA for Africa’s ‘We Are the World’ for famine relief; Steven Van Zandt’s ‘Sun City’ in protest of South African apartheid; and a Dionne Warwick remake of the Burt Bacharach ballad, ‘That’s What Friends Are For’ for AIDS research.
…At Live Aid, regular songs became anthems as they assumed the gravitas of the day. Howard Jones’s ‘Hide and Seek;’ U2’s 12-minute version of ‘Bad;’ and the gospel overtones of Teddy Pendergrass singing, ‘Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)’ added to the show’s groundswell. ‘It was like dropping a pebble in a pond, and the ripples were huge,’ says the co-organizer, Ure. ‘The average guy on the street felt connected to making a difference. Live Aid wasn’t [the artists’ baby], it belonged to the fans. They created the momentum by putting their hands in their pockets, buying the record, and by being at the concerts.’
Elizabeth McLaughlin was 23 when she attended the London show and stood within feet of the stage. She remembers the moment the sun fell below the rim of Wembley Stadium and the audience clapped in unison to Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga.’ ‘People were crying a lot,’ she says. ‘The combination of the images on the screens and the messages coming from the artists reminded us why we were there. We knew we had to do more.’ McLaughlin credits Live Aid for influencing her to leave a career as stockbroker and later become a country director for CARE. ‘Whatever came out of Live Aid’millions of pounds and dollars, that’s great. But what really happened at the concert is that a new generation was born, a generation meant to be aware of what’s going on around us.’”
UPDATE 1:
We’ve been watching the concert for two days now–it will take days to finish. No further words to try to describe the indescribable.
WE URGE you as much as we can, to watch it yourself. There is an official version that has most but not all of it, and much is available in clips on You Tube and other sources. Just search and watch.
Without diminishing any other parts of it, here’s a few observations in addition to what was already written:
One of the most memorable moments in modern history was when the CBC video was shown at Live Aid of scenes of starving children in Ethiopia. The background music was by the group “The Cars”, known for up tempo music–but their down tempo piece “Drive” was used for this.
“Whos gonna tell you when its too late. Whos gonna tell you things aren’t so great” it starts–with a starving infant trying to stand.
‘There was not a dry eye left in Wembley stadium’–wrote Robin Levinson King yesterday in The Toronto Star marking the 30th anniversary. And not a dry eye on the planet watching.
Then to the other end of the spectrum of emotion with the emblazoned image (you didn’t need to be alive or to know where this came from–you’ve seen this) of Mick Jagger and Tina Turner at night in Wembley tearing it up (and tearing their clothes off to just the perfect tasteful extent to be a great act) with the only version of “‘Its Only Rock And Roll’ that has ever mattered since.
And then swinging to another place in the spectrum, with Paul McCartney at the end of the night, mic not working at first, followed by the whole stadium joining in with “Let It Be”.
And while singing toward the end McCartney cries out, ‘I want to thank God and everybody for doing this.’
Earlier, Sting and Phil Collins do a unique, beautiful duo of “Every Breath You Take”. With a young saxophonist, Branford Marsalis, making it a trio moment also not to be forgotten.
Which takes us to the famous Phil Collins story–he left Wembley, hopped on a concorde and ended up at JFK in Philadelphia in the afternoon, the only artist to play at both stadiums on both continents the same day.
Collins on drums with Eric Clapton doing “Layla” wasn’t too bad.
Then there was this young woman just about to burst into superstardom–Madonna.
She’s like a kid, with all the energy in the world–a smile to die for, and a voice that was, of course, the natural extraordinary voice that she has. She’s dancing all over the stage, never stops moving, never misses a step or a beat, as she belts out “Holiday”.
With words for a special day:
‘We can turn the world around, we will find a way to come together, celebration, come together, every nation.’
Then after finishing she says:
‘You know there’s a lot of major, quote, unquote, ‘stars’ here today ‘but you know it doesn’t matter whose here, its why you’re here.’
And the end of the whole thing, hours after the end at Wembley, with an ensemble of music icons at JFK performing “We Are The World”.
You’ve got to see it. All of it.
Twenty years later, in July again, 2005, many of the same stars, and many new ones, came together, for a follow-up to Live Aid, Live 8 (a reference to the G-8, the major world powers, meeting to discuss efforts to alleviate poverty). Here’s Geldof again, venues in all eight nations, arranged well ahead of time and far easier to broadcast (to about 3 billion overall over a longer period than a day, and frighteningly in terms of population, probably a smaller percentage than saw and heard Live Aid).
Live 8 was meant in part to pressure the G-8 into doing more to support the UN campaign to make poverty history (with millennium goals for a decade later, this year–with progress made, and not).
Sting “stung” with the message by turning the lyrics of “Every Breath You Take” into an indictment of world leaders. Not a bad evolution.
But perhaps the capper was the moment that took us back to the creation.
Birhan Weldu was the three-year old starving girl in the CBC film at Live Aid who became the event’s poster child. She recovered and life improved dramatically for her, but she is having difficulty now, financially (she appears to be getting help, as she should) and with the fame that has followed her. Like everyone, she says long-term development, more than food aid, is what’s needed (Geldof has agreed for a long time–and in fact both are needed in the right way, but that’s another story.) On this 30th anniversary, she still praises Live Aid for what it accomplished.
So, there’s Bob Geldoff on stage in Hyde Park for Live 8, with the three year old girl who was days away from dying in the CBC film if she had not been saved from starvation, now a beaming 24-year old student.
Then Geldof introduces Madonna, who takes Birhan Weldu in her arms, as she starts singing one of her most famous songs, the only version for all times now:
The Guardian reported on what happened when the film from Live Aid was shown at Live 8.
‘Shown dozens of times in the past 20 years, the old Live Aid film of the Ethiopian famine set to Drive by the Cars should theoretically have had its impact dulled by familiarity. Instead, it stuns Hyde Park into silence.’
There’s a prayer for the ages. Amen.
And now, back to the purpose of the prayer.
Action.
UPDATE 2:
Mandatory Viewing:
It has become clear in watching the endless footage of the Live Aid concert and broadcast that there is one must for everyone to see or revisit–the BBC documentary in 2005, the 20th anniversary year: “Live Aid, Against all Odds.” It’s generally viewable in two parts, each about an hour and a half.
You won’t get far before the nurse who had to decide who was going to live and who was going to die in one of the camps in Ethiopia in 1984, and a BBC reporter covering the famine, make clear that when they first heard of the “music coming to save Africa” concept initialized with the “Do They Know Its Christmas” fundraising top of the charts single—from the rich, white, brain dead on drugs, soul dead from narcissistic promiscuity, and all- around egomaniac celebrity crowd (pretty much the description they give)—they treated the idea with the scorn it, frankly, deserved.
Until they changed their minds because of what happened. It was a bit like Geldof himself, who was a self- obsessed celebrity, and became a kind of Schindler (presumably you’ve seen “Schindler’s List”, if not, stop, watch it, then come back), a self-obsessed shallow man who was changed completely by the experience of seeing incomprehensible human suffering and evil. Except in Geldof’s case, the convergence in history that he was living in, which made possible the convergence he created, had a global evolutionary leap impact.
The moment of sudden and striking realization for Geldof was the experience he describes of seeing the BBC news footage the night the whole western world saw it in 1984–on the networks in the US when everyone watched NBC, ABC or CBS–of starving babies and people completely unlike anything ever seen–as riveting as it gets.
Everything wrong with celebrities, or the world, or the rich (people and nations), giving with one hand and taking with another, and the cultures which enable this, and the general selfishness and denial of the great majority of the populations in the west, and the powerful few bleeding out their own people in the poor nations, and cultural collusion and denial here too, all part of the human struggle between good and evil, and so on—were true before, during and after. But also true, was and is, that starting with one person (as often the case) relentlessly committed to making a difference urgently, the world was changed–for a moment electrifying everyone involved and reminding of what we are all about in the end. And after the moment passed, the world was still moved forward in the big picture, in the grinding toward the possibility of one world functioning rather than one world being destroyed.
This documentary captures the entirety of the human experience, the behind the scenes footage no one had seen, interviews then and now, brutal and beautiful honesty, moving beyond all words to hysterical (yes, all the parts of life are always involved), and the music, and the point, of course.
Do Not Miss It.
In many ways, without seeing this, you can’t know, or fully know, where we’ve been, what happened, where we are and where we’re going.
Of course, many other things are required to accomplish the above.
But this is one of the absolute necessities.
. . .
To be continued.