Friday, March 9, 2012

KONY 2012

 Joseph Kony

After 3:30 this afternoon, I will officially be on spring break! I am so glad that I will not have to hear my students talk about Kony 2012 for a while. Boys and girls alike are obsessed with the viral video. The non-profit, Invisible Children, has spent over a third of their total income on the production of this film. No wonder the film is catching the masses' attention. I guess it is safe to say that Invisible Children does not spend their donations frugally. I have qualms with that, but let's stick to the bigger issue at hand.

I know that Kony is truly a bad guy worth punishing. The problem lies in the fact that people don't fully understand politics. It is not the United States' place to just go into Uganda and be a hero. I support being a humanitarian, but I also believe that the United States should not exert their power to save every single country in need. If we don't want to be known as an imperialist nation, how about trying not to butt our noses into places where we do not belong. We already have troops in Uganda and they have already attempted to kill Kony. If anything, U.S. involvement in trying to kill Kony has lead to even more conflict. Let countries handle themselves unless it begins to interfere directly with the U.S. There is a lot of bad in this world and I'm sorry to say this, but the United States is not in the position to fix all of it. How egotistic are we as Americans to believe that we can solve something that the people of Uganda cannot? Throwing money or clicking on links is not enough to capture Kony. If you really want to capture Kony, let the people of Uganda figure it out, do not insult their intelligence by interfering.

Being Latina is complicated!

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 9, 2012 at 10:12 AM

    Agreed, we as a country are not focusing on our priorities, which is our domestic policies (Ex:education,jobs,infrastructure,and others). One thing I will say is that once Uganda starts pumping billions of dollars of oil, which is bound to happen soon. The European nations,China, and the United States will start to pay more attention to this matter.

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  2. WendyMarch 11, 2012 at 2:55 PM

    I agree!... We are now concerned with Uganda because of the huge wealth of oil. Strategic and economic motives being pushed forward by what people think is "humanitarianism." Although it would be great, if people really pushed activism through a more critical lens, not simply because it is a trending feed. We actually had this conversation in my 10th grade world history class and students themselves figured that all of this was being pushed with the ultimate intention to control the resources. ( Same way the U.S. is doing in Iraq... the way they did all over Central and South America) The viral video and the huge campaign that is following will allow for a general consensus to "try to bring democracy" to the nation, thus support for U.S. intervention). History does repeat itself... and we have so many things we could be fixing internally instead...

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