EDITORIAL

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ometimes, when looking on success from the outside, one imagines a straight, shining path, without obstacles or pitfalls. Two stories of success, told a few weeks ago at the TEDx mega-conference at the Politeama Theater in Lecce, that of the biologist and businessman from Salento, Claudio Quarta, and that of the Tiscali founder and former President of the Sardinian Regional Authority, Sardinian Renato Soru, showed how every life, and every career, even the most brilliant, are like roller-coaster type graphs, where only those who are able to pick themselves up out of the abyss will really make it.

Courage was the theme of this amazing marathon of stories (almost six hours which flew by), along the lines of TED, annual conferences with protagonists of international repute, that have been held for the last 29 years at Long Beach, in California, and have hosted guests like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, Isabel Allende, etc. and that have as their aim the promulgation of ideas worth spreading.

For a while now TED, transformed into TEDx in the rest of the world, has been pursuing its mission well outside the confines of the U.S.A.; in 2012 there were more than 3,000 conferences in more than 130 nations.

Praise must go to Gabriella Morelli and Vito Margiotta of xOff for having brought it to Lecce for the second time and with a range of names, famous and less famous, but all people who are able to bear extraordinary witness. Not only stories of business success and rise and falls but tales that offered us an incredibly broad panorama.

Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Senator Bob Kennedy, with that surname and those chromosomes could have done anything she wanted with her life, but she has had the courage to choose to dedicate herself full-time to the defense of human rights. In Lecce she spoke of her experiences with a charisma worthy of her name, and with great simplicity. Who better than a tight-rope walker can explain what courage is? The unusual thing is that Andrea Loreni, as well as being able to whirl on a rope at dizzying heights, is also a graduate in Theoretical Philosophy. Who better to speak of courage than Alessandro Leo, chairman of the “Libera Terra” Co-operative, that in Puglia is working to transform the lands and the property confiscated from the Sacra corona unita (organized crime syndicate)? A wonderful speech, too, from the young leader Maryam Al Khawaja, an activist for human rights, who told of the risks run and threats received, and of her father who has also been tortured but, like her, has not given up struggling for the democratization of Bahrain. Federico Morello is not 20 years old yet. At the age of 13 he began writing to the mayor of his town in an attempt to bring broadband to Lestans, in the province of Pordenone. A year later he was in charge of the regional association which brought broadband to western Friuli. Nominated Alfiere della Repubblica Italiana in 2012, since March 2013 he has been acting as young advisor for the implementing of the Agenda Digitale Europea. The free software programmer, Jaromil, able to create contaminations between social activism, code and art, made reference to the complex problems of our age, to the courage needed to do the right thing and to the recurring and devastating crises of the capitalist system, a dead horse not worth flogging since we should – courageously – try new and unexplored paths. The Afghan designer, Massoud Hassani, born and raised in Kabul, knows the horrors of war well, and knows that every 22 minutes, somewhere in the world, someone, often a child, dies or is mutilated by the explosion of a landmine. Hassani is the inventor of Mine Kafon, an ecological and bio-degradable device, fuelled by the wind, that can roll over the mined lands and set off the unexploded bombs. Vincenzo Deluci, a musician who was carving an important career for himself in the field of jazz, has been paraplegic since a road accident in 2004. But after having regained the use of a forearm he took up playing anew, this time with a trumpet that was especially adapted for him, and has begun to play in public again. All the speakers would be worthy of a mention but there were really so many.

Each contribution lasted from five to a maximum of twenty minutes, a demanding format, a real brainstorming that generated a great surge of adrenalin in the prevailingly young audience in the packed theater.

Stories of courage in which everybody spoke of fear and how courage overcame it. Stories that made us understand that everything is possible if you don’t give in to resignation and that, as someone said, it’s not enough to “decide to do something”; what you have to do is just “do it”.