Lisa Hong

In regards to the retaliation against KONY2012; I think the opposition has a very good point. Like any social injustice problem in this world, things are never black and white, and there are more complexities in these issues than meets the eye. 

At the deep core of who I am, my heart cries against injustice. I think in all of humanity, we all have that. There are thousands of world issues today that deserve our attention. One of them closer to my heart is HIV/AIDS, which is why I decided to focus my year-end thesis on that topic. Yet there are no clear solutions even for issues like HIV/AIDS. Why? Because the problem is this complex interconnected web between poverty, government corruption, environment, the economy, women’s education, and health care. If we catch Joseph Kony, what do we do? Create another mass social campaign against the other 100 criminals on that list they showed in the video? 

I think the reason why it hit everyone so deep is because the video simplified the problem in a visually striking way. It made things easy to understand and seemingly easy to fix. But more than that, it connected us to a passion that lies within every one of our hearts all around the world; our heart’s cry for justice. To myself, KONY2012 is more than the issue itself. It’s a social experiment like they say. It’s shows us how our world is not only amazingly connected via social media, but through our innate humanity. It has reminded us that we all really do stand on one cause. 

In regards to the recent articles going around about the amount of money Invisible Children has spent, and how only 32% has gone to direct support; I am not surprised. To create awareness at this level in this society is not easy. It’s not easy to catch the attention of millions of people without the aid of visual stimulation. Our hearts, our eyes are bored. And it makes us aware just how sad it really has become. There are so many problems in this world. What did it take for us to wake up? Millions of dollars. Even our hearts have become expensive to buy. 

I don’t support the military interventions that Invisible Children apparently abides by. I’m no expert in the matter of how to catch a criminal. Yet I hope the retaliation and the wide-scale level of awareness will now make Invisible children more accountable to their actions, the sooner the better. 

However in all, KONY2012 still excites me. It excites me because it is the first. It’s our preliminary step towards using the whored out technology of social media for the good on such a wide-scale. And it can only get better than this.