Please forgive me this rant… I just CAN NOT help myself… It's been a while since I've ranted anyways so I'm letting loose on this latest intellectual atrocity, this social grey matter killing field, this latest fast-food disinformation video campaign that is "KONY 2012" !!
I spotted the headline on Aljazeera 3 days ago about an online video campaign against the LRA's leader (Joseph Kony) going viral on YouTube and getting a lot of attention. I have been reading about this decades old regional struggle for years now and was really impressed to see this story in the headlines. Like in many other cases, it is not the degree of importance of a story that necessarily makes it important enough for a front page… Or sometimes any page at all! I was really impressed and hurried through the link and to the said video. I honestly had a skewed opinion from the start and wanted nothing more than to post that video on my blog to help promote it! Here was a story I truly believed, desperately needed more attention! To my greatest disappointment and disillusionment, I couldn't bear viewing past the 7 minute mark. Within seconds the disappointment turned into anger! And for the last three days I've been writing and writing, trying to vent out of me the indignation about how horrible this attempt was, how misinformed, how dangerously simplistic and so very naive everything about this disastrous piece of media was!! As much as the initiative is well meant and the proliferation impressive the actual simplistic information in this piece is disgraceful and socially harmful to so many! One just cannot, for the "greater purpose of wanting to change the world for the better", engage in such dangerously simplistic, ill informed, narrow minded explanations! This "KONY 2012" video campaign is a disgrace to all who are involved in this conflict, it borders dangerous dis-information for those interested and serves no one's interest but the egos of the makers, "Invisible Children" ! I cannot imagine anyone short of FOX News doing any worse! It just got under my skin and absolutely fuming for the last 3 days!
Promotion of ignorance is, in my opinion, a very serious crime! Dis-information of that stature can serve no good, to anyone and apart from putting this story under the spotlight of the online community (which could have been a good thing if they had stopped at that and simply introduced the subject neutrally as opposed to try to explain what they obviously couldn't understand) it is horribly demeaning and an other grand example of the West's firm belief in it's moral high ground on humanity's problems, in this well too common case of the poor black people of Africa's need for the West's helping hand to civilize them!
Sure there are literally millions of uninformed people screaming their opinions about subjects that obviously surpass them all over the world wide web, but this one touches me more! For one, because I've personally been reading and researching a whole lot about the facts about the complexity of this story for the last few years but secondly, the obvious fact that it has been getting so much attention!
Like I said, I've been writing away my anger about this for a few days now and came up with, what I can only now look back and describe as a short novel… On the one side I just can't do that to ya… Post a massive chunk of text with nothing to look at! But also, being interested in this story and searching for more educated opinions, I stumbled on a few articles who describe my ills with the said video campaign in words far better than the ones I could ever come up with!
I share these opinions almost integrally, just sadly for me, not their far better vocabulary and knowledge about the facts. If you are at all interested in this whole subject, do yourself a favour and read these two pieces! Even if you disagree, finding out different opinions about anything can only really help you understand something even better!
-Adam Branch's,
Dangerous Ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012. Absolutely great piece of rant/real information about the greater story!!!
-Q & A with Firoze Manji,
Does "Kony2012" do more harm than good? Clear explanations about the deconstruction of the video with once again, more actual facts!!!
::: EDIT :::
Since then, there has been so much attention on this story that it just received it's own page on AJ...
Check it out if interested!
Enough about this now…
I don't do these rant posts to push my opinions on people, I just found out over the years that posting these rants really helps getting them out of my system!
And well… I do have opinions!
Tomorrow? Red Box day with more images than words and most probably no relation to any sort of current event whatsoever!
