Kony2012 and why we should still care

[desikitteh]

On March 5th 2012, Invisible Children released a video called Kony 2012 documenting the atrocities of Jospeh Kony, a Ugadan Warlord and head of the LRA. This video went viral and made a lot of us very angry, creating conversations and memes on facebook and twitter and spreading around the net, with #kony2012 trending globally on twitter and youtube.

Then the other shoe dropped. IC’s real motivations were revealed, their financial practises discovered and their director, Jason Russell was arrested for being drunk and masturbating in public. All of a sudden the conversation stopped. #kony2012 stopped trending and #horny2012 started to. Jason Russell became a laughing stock and the invisible children he had been talking about melted back into the shadows.

The thing is, while IC and Russell had some pretty screwed up motivations and were in fact using the cause for their own purposes, there was a silver linning to their actions. They started a conversation. They made us think about the effects of war, not just the ones splashed all over the news, but the long running civil wars that the media just stop talking about. This is a step. The mistake we made is that when we found out that the messenger was fallible, we stopped listening to the message. Despite the problems with IC, there are many millions of men, women and children subject to the horrors of war each day. This is something we need to keep talking about. This is something we need to act on, something we need to give aid in stopping.

So what can you do? Start the conversation again, support charities that are really working in these areas, write to politicians, the UN, your local paper and anyone else who’ll listen. Hell, shout it from the rooftops if you think it’ll help. But most of all do not give up on a valuable cause because the messenger is imperfect.

Some Charities/Groups to contact and support:

• Amnesty International
• Red Cross
• Save the Children
• UNHCR
• UNICEF

will keep updating this list as i find more

Originally published at desi's blog