Knowledge of notorious Joseph Kony has reached new heights, fueled by a highly successful viral campaign from the NGO In-visible Children.
This Internet-enabled dissemination is amazing to see, as spreading awareness of poverty in developing nations will certainly help to resolve the issues over the long-term.
That said, there is no easy solution to the problem. Advocating the capture of one man will not fix the underlying issues of rampant disparity and corruption, nor will it break the cycle of violence which leads youth to take up arms in the first place.
As well, considering how the US sent troops to Africa to hunt down Kony last year, one wonders just how much this viral campaign has been bolstered by pro-war entities seeking to justify another American military endeavor.
If we really do want to help out impoverished children, not just in Africa, but in every war-ravaged place on earth, perhaps the best course of action is to first figure out how to get a functioning democracy back home. Then we can export it to them.
Right now, our own system is broken. Too much power is allowed to concentrate into too few hands, leaving us open to the same kind of corruption and exploitation faced by the children of Uganda (albeit on a different level).
Until we remove the criminals who sit atop our own hierarchies, looting the public coffers and systematically stripping us of our rights, we won’t truly be able to help the rest of the world with their problems.
Still, as evidenced by the Kony project, sometimes all it takes is for the right video, the right meme, to encapsulate an entire movement for it to get propelled into the mainstream. When we do something like this for establishing an effective egalitarian system, our whole world will transform seemingly overnight.
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Tags: 2012, child, children, exploitation, invisible, kony, ngo, slavery, soldier, Sudan, uganda
