U2's lead singer Bono says his habit of reaching across the political spectrum to work for causes he believes in has been stretched with the election of Donald Trump.
The upcoming "Songs of Experience" took on a different tone, Bono tells Rolling Stone, amid Trump's election and the Brexit vote in Great Britain.
"You've had the same sort of disaffection in the United States with the rise of a new kind of constituency, people on the both left and right who have lost faith in political process, the body politic, in political institutions," he said. "These sentiments are easily played and manipulated by the likes of Donald Trump. In a world where people feel bullied by their circumstance, sometimes people fall prey to a bully of their own."
Bono said people around him, both conservative and liberal, say they feel now is a defining moment in their lives and their country.
"After the election, some people on the left were almost grieving I'd say, and when I try to understand this, I realized there was a kind of mourning, a mourning for innocence that was lost," he said.
"For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality, and justice for all," Bono continued. "The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump's verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history, and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact."
As for his adding lyrics to the band's classic "Bullet the Blue Sky" in a recent "Tonight Show" appearance that were unambigously anti-Trump, Bono said, "It is a little bit of a departure, as I've always believed in working across the aisle as an anti-poverty activist but this isn't a matter of right or left. There's a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option."
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