International Awareness

If you haven't already heard of or seen this video/ movement, please take 30 minutes off from your facebook/twitter/other form of social media to watch this short documentary.


In lack of better words, wow.
In order not to deprive my aching body from sleep, I will attempt from being too verbiage.

     Primarily, I think this is great. This film was released on March 5th and has already gone viral throughout the interweb. It also amazes me how astounding the amplitude of sudden awareness of this social media platform. I'm sure there are two sides to every story, but I don't even want to get into that. I'm curious as to why the world is finding out about this NOW? Aside from facebook (deactivated), the newsfeeds/timelines/dashboards/etc. of all my social networks have been abruptly bombarded with KONY. What is KONY?

KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.

He is THE WORST LIVING CRIMINAL. He abducts children and makes them use guns to kill their own parents. He takes girls and forces them to be sex slaves. He calls his abducted children the Lord’s Resistance Army, AKA the LRA. He has abducted over 30,000 children and forced them to be child soldiers in Central Africa. He remains at large because he is INVISIBLE to the world. FEW know his name, even FEWER know his crimes. WE ARE MAKING HIM FAMOUS! Because when he is, the world will unite against him and demand his arrest.

      Summarily, this campaign is to raise awareness on the injustices and enslavement of child soldiers in Uganda. This sounds vaguely familiar to a book I read sophomore year, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah and the movie Hotel Rwanda. According to the video, it's been 9+ years of awareness of this issue, but where has the rest of the world (or America) been? There have been 11 of films on this matter, as well as novels, articles, exhibits, autobiographies. It's so typical and disgruntling of society have to wait until the campaign fits our social agenda to be aware. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that they utilized social media to spread awareness, but we had to wait until it was one click away on YouTube to truly know anything. If it wasn't for this film you've seen through one of your social networks through a computer screen or phone, how much would we know? And I include myself on being the 90% of the world unaware of this issue.

Kony is now the moniker of evil, but do you know what has led us to this point? No, not really. Because privilege only enjoys social justice when it isn’t strenuous.


This is just one example of how powerful social media and propaganda is on controlling what we see simply by convenience. Like it or not, social media plays a pivotal point in our generation and it's nice to see some good out of it.

But on the legitimacy and purpose of this campaign... that's a whole other post.