that’s no longer necessary. - Bono

Our fans were often the same age as us, and we would prove to ourselves and them that we were the real punks. We were zealots of a kind with a determination not to surrender our values to the big cities, but rather bring them our true punk values like respect for the people who were paying to see us. We’d make it our business to stop and talk, to sign autographs. We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to. And as the singer, I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd, by rubbishing the very idea they were a crowd. This was not just a nucleus of unstable atoms banging into each other; this was a gathering of sentient beings who for those few hours every night played the most important role in the drama, transporting the band and therefore themselves to some place neither had been before. Finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.

You belong only to the here and now. This is no Oceanus of faceless faces; you are trying to make eye contact with everyone. But you can’t … until you can. If you get it right, you’ve not just eyeballed everybody in the front row; you’ve eyeballed everybody in the venue. And there’s no one who doesn’t think you might follow them home, that you might pick their pocket or preach them your gospel or make out with them. Or their sister. Contact has been made, real and imagined.

... But the one thing we can all agree — all faiths, all ideologies — is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.