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KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
the last thing we need is another war. we are just starting to recover from our economic crisis, why jump back in?
The problem is that spreading awareness is not an end in itself. It is purposed towards a different goal. In the case of breast cancer and prostate cancer, the awareness campaigns channel donations through thoroughly vetted heavily overseen bodies like United Way to charities which meet extremely high standards. Not to mention, when you donate to prostate cancer charities, you know where the money is going - it's going to fund studies with an aim to finding a cure. When you fund invisible children, you are funding a group with a particular perspective on how African kids can be helped; namely, an increase in force-based intervention with a view to capturing Joseph Kony. It is pretty much certain that funding cancer studies will help cure cancer, or at least if the studies lead nowhere, the worst case scenario is we know we should focus on other avenues and no one has lost anything. That is not the case with invisible children. The agenda they propose could very well do significant and lasting damage to the people of Uganda. This is exacerbated by the fact that the millions of dollars being contributed to potentially DO this damage could instead be going to things that actually would help - clean water wells, roads, etc. Even those things, granted, can have unforeseen consequences - can you imagine the damage that can result from funding a ground campaign?
In other words, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This casting them as the little guy standing up for what's right is more emotional bullshit that doesn't contribute anything but dramatics and rhetoric and is symptomatic of what I think is really insidious about this whole campaign, first of all. They aren't heroic, any more than any other small charity is.
The people who join facebook groups do not, in and of themselves, help or hurt anything. That's pretty harmless, except to the extent it encourages people to donate money to this. They consistently say that we all agree on the basic premise that "Kony must be stopped", but the problem with that is that NO one should agree with that proposition if the cure will be worse than the disease. I am very skeptical that their cure would be better than the disease. If "raising awareness" leads to millions of dollars flowing to a group that ultimately makes things WORSE for Ugandans then raising awareness is not a positive thing.
