Stay Angry? President Obama's Poor Advice to the Next Generation

Stay angry? Don't reckon, not if our objective is transformation or the well-being of a generation increasingly gripped by despair.

In his COP26 speech yesterday, President Obama urged young people to stay angry in the fight against climate change. That disturbed me for a number of reasons.

The first is that a recent global survey of 10,000 young people aged 16-24, spanning 10 countries, confirmed that serious mental health issues exist amongst young people around climate despair. More than half of all respondents said they had felt afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty.

Anger can help us get bad stuff off our chests, but living with it constantly doesn't sound like wise advice for a generation battling depression and despair. We need to help young people find respite from these dark feelings. The best way to do that is for us to inspire them by acting in a strong, credible way on climate change and engaging them and helping them to be part of the solution.

The second is that staying constantly angry in a fight often gets us or the other protagonists, bloodied noses. Bloodied noses rarely inspire meaningful conversations. Angry fights get in the way of people coming together to find common ground. If we understand that the fight isn't the objective, that transformation is our end game, we need a different way.

And thirdly, blaming someone else and larding them with our negative judgements seldom helps them travel to a different place. Young people own very few of the emissions that are driving today's climate change, but they already own some that will drive future emissions. Humanity owns climate change and we can be upset with people who have long gotten in the way of change, for sure. We may never love them, but hating them and being constantly angry toward them won't get us far.

Helping people, communities, businesses, whole industries and governments transition to a new, different way, requires calm. It requires that someone occupies that space between warring factions and helps, mediates, and quietly nudges until we reach a point where great transformations cascade.

Years of angry NGOs yelling at companies and governments to change haven't gotten us very far on their own. The changes that NGOs most celebrate have almost always come about because someone calmly occupied that liminal space in between, they made it safe and then invited folk to come there to find a way forward.

A bit of anger raises tensions and we can use that to bring people together. But constant anger neither gets us far in the transitions we seek or supports the well-being of the angry.

It's bad advice President O.

Better to help everyone, kids and adults, understand how deep, lasting and far-reaching transformations happen. Examples do exist where protagonists found a different way. We should study them and understand the intricate, intimate details of how they unfolded. Then go out and take that different way into everything we do.