Kony2012. It’s a slogan that everybody with a computer, phone, television, or ability to talk to another person has probably heard of by now. And it’s causing me a lot of confusion.
The phrase represents the campaign by the nonprofit group Invisible Children to stop Joseph Kony, guerrilla leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, formally in Uganda and now in other areas of central Africa.
Kony and the LRA are responsible for mass murders, rapes, mutilations, and the use of child soldiers, the latter of which Invisible Children makes the most important part of its message.
Kony’s atrocities aren’t what I’m confused about. It’s widely accepted that he and his army have done terrible things. My problem is I wonder what I should do about it, and how I should go about doing it.
All this information about Kony was released via a 29-minute video produced by Invisible Children, which went viral this week. My Facebook feed blew up. I couldn’t load Tumblr because of all the posts, and the subject was trending worldwide on Twitter.
I figured I should watch it, so at 2 a.m. I sat in my kitchen and pressed play. I was sucked in by the stories of the kids in Uganda who lived in fear of abduction into a child army. I was wooed by the image of the filmmaker’s adorable son as he reacted to learning about Joseph Kony for the first time, and felt like I needed to do something, anything.
“This is something we can all agree on,” I was told. I donated $10, and went to bed wondering what else I could do to help.
I should have known that there is almost nothing we can all agree on.
The next morning I woke up to a completely different dialogue on my Facebook page: the backlash. For all the people who had shared the video or reposted the slogan, there was one saying that we shouldn’t have.
I read tweets wondering where all these “activists” were years ago, implying that I was too late, and that I should feel shame because I didn’t know the issue existed before now.
More posts called Invisible Children’s expenses into question, while others denounced the video because of the filmmaker’s air of self-importance (which, I’ll admit, was pretty annoying). A recent article in Time is titled “Why You Should Feel Awkward About the ‘Kony2012’ Video.”
I started to wonder if I shouldn’t have given in so quickly.
Part of me wanted to say that people react negatively against anything that’s become popular quickly, while another part realized I probably should have thought more critically about the situation first.
But now that I am doing just that, I have no idea what to do. The issue is made even more confusing because of Invisible Children’s good intentions. Few are disputing that its heart is in the right place.
But accusers say they’re going about it in the wrong way and oversimplifying the issue. The group does risk many people forgetting about the movement after the viral sensation has passed, but this has shown the capacity for social media to bring an issue to light.
So, now, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I’m supposed to support the cause but denounce the video, support them both, or oppose them both. If I support it, I face being called a bandwagoner who didn’t care until now. If I don’t, I’m accused of heartlessness. The more I read, the more lost I become.
Something that I was told we could all agree on has turned into something that everybody has a die-hard opinion about, and I feel awkwardly stuck somewhere in the middle.
My $10 is in the Invisible Children bank account. A copy of the video is on my Facebook timeline, where I shared it after my quick rush of emotion. Meanwhile, I sit here wondering which is worse: sharing it without doing my own research, or taking it down after the fact.
Emily Bullard of Lakewood is a sophomore at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
