KONY 2012

Oh dear. Serious alert.

This blog is supposed to be light hearted, fun, and just a bit of practice writing. And I don’t get annoyed very easily. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get annoyed at the KONY 2012 campaign, I got annoyed at the reaction to it.

The backlash by supposedly rational people has been extraordinary. This is a campaign about bringing to justice someone who abuses thousands of children, but apparently it’s not important because AIDS exists. And people are dying from malnourishment. So what does it matter if one little girl is sold into the sex trade, or one little boy is shot in war when he should be at school? We need to get our priorities right, don’t we?

This is the viewpoint of a staggering amount of people (ok, apart from the graphic descriptions I’ve put in to make them sound stupid). We should not be looking for Kony, because there are other, admittedly bigger problems in the world. Malnutrition claims the life of (warning: badly researched statistic) 6 million children every year, that is what we should be worried about. Anyone who thinks this is sensible and has  a sense of perspective. They have also massively missed the point.

Before today, or whenever this Kony thing started, everyone knew about malnutrition. Of course people are starving in Africa, that’s how it’s been all our lives. No one had heard of Joseph Kony. He is an atrocious man, no one is denying that, perhaps aside from him and his 60 wives and 42 children. He is also a problem that can be solved with one, well directed bullet. World hunger is not. Anyone who says that America’s priorities are misguided has probably not put a second thought into it.

I don’t like to sit on the fence, but I do love to shoot both arguments down. What good is it for a middle class 16 year old from England to watch a video about a terrible man, given that I have no idea where he is, or how to find him. And I’m certainly not going to help bring him to justice. Sometimes, raising awareness is futile. Raising awareness for AIDS is important, for I may someday catch it myself, raising awareness of world hunger is important because next time I want to buy a book, I will go to the Oxfam book shop, rather than Waterstones, knowing that at least some of the money from my Dilbert book will go to helping solve world hunger. I have nothing to do with Kony and knowing about it isn’t going to help.

So everybody who is saying that this campaign is pointless because there is still hunger in the world, do something to help solve it. Since 2006 I’ve ‘adopted’ a Gambian boy, although I had to leave him there because he was too heavy to go in my luggage. But I still pay for his food and schooling. Nothing will be helped by moaning about someone else’s charitable causes. And nothing will be helped by watching the Kony video either, although at least it has stirred up some interesting debate.

There are better videos to watch on youtube, some that will at least do some good. Like make you happy, make you laugh. Here’s one. It’s simply entitled “Fat People Falling Over”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNupRTfpM9s