What are you angry about?

I spent the weekend in Geneva hosted by EUConsult, the European network of nonprofit consultants. My presentation wasn’t well targeted for the event but i had a great chat with Daryll, one of the best fundraisers on the continent. He was at the forefront of battling years of Labour, involved in the Sandinista Revolution and one of masterminds behind Greenpeace’s fame as the most progressive NGO. Once he rented a Russian satellite to screw Coca-Cola’s ad campaign. Not a boring person.

When he was my age, he lived through a tough time: the Cold War, apartheid in South Africa, nuclear proliferation, Maggie Thatcher, evil corporations and nobody cared about the environment. The enemies were there and it was clear what you fought for. You knew what you were angry about.

Today is the opposite. Porto Alegre is connected to Davos in teleconference, Mandela is a global hero and Obama is president of the US, corporations compete in CSR, and we’ve got the Tokyo Protocol and UN Millenium Development Goals. Bush is gone and nobody likes Belarusian, Burmese and Iranian governments. We’ve got everything and we don’t have any reason to be angry… but we are still angry. We don’t know how to channel our anger, make the revolution à la Bobo (burgeaois-boheme) afraid to loose our privileges.

Twice I faced that anger in my life: at Sarajevo and the G8 summit in Genoa. It was anger against stupid violence and I decided to look for a way to transform it. Anger is just emotional energy which can be channelled differently like the path of a river.

I went to Sarajevo following a Bosnian artist: Alma Suljevic. I discover the war, its stupidity and my indifference. The town is three hours far from my home: an hour from bologna – Riccione, another hour to reach the coast of Adriatic by boat and a bit more than hour to Sarajevo. It was so close but I didn’t know anything about the war. We didn’t do anything to stop a war waged to enrich few yet divide all. We were all busy shopping.

G8 in Genoa was different; the highest concentration of people concerned with globalization: different backgrounds, knowledge and values but all concerned with the same challenge. Instead of sitting down to pool ideas and resources they entrenched in their assumptions and fought each others with no benefit for anybody. A stupid waste of energy and talents.

Thanks to these episodes I have learnt that it has to be different. We won’t get to the anger that Daryll described as the conditions have changed and it’s not productive anymore. We can’t destinguish that anger but we must channel it cleverly. We must become masters of our own anger. I run everyday for an hour… so i don’t shoot my fellow citizens.

I learnt that the key is in connecting people and finding the common ground for them to interact. Champagne helps. This is my job but it’s not enough. We need a shared framework to picture ourselves and our fellows across borders as part of a community; we need a new paradigm to think and act together. otherwise we fall back to the old ideologies.

I will spend the weekend with Adelina von Furstenberg who established Art for the World to put art at the service of human rights. She might be helpful!