KONY

So for those of you who don't know - KONY is this bad guy in Africa (that's the tl;dr version of it - if you want to know more, Google is your friend). This blog post isn't supposed to be explaining who he is, what he does and why he's bad - it's more a rant of why I can't understand why people can't just share the knowledge of this guy and raise awareness.

People are complaining that many people watch one 30 minute video and become social activists. I've been an activist for a lot of things for a while - I support gay rights (as in, I wish they'd have equal rights just the same as straights) and stuff like that. I don't think it's fair to complain and refuse to share a video to raise awareness just because everyone else is doing it and claiming that they obviously don't know why they're doing it. If you hear the words 'invisible child army' - what would you do? Turn a blind eye?

I got a lot of stick for saying that raising awareness is a good thing - someone turned around and told me that it does nothing. Sorry, but there's more than a million people on Facebook. A million is still a lot of people; more than 4 million people have watched the KONY video going around on Youtube. Apparently people share the link, make a status, and then two hours later forget about it and think "why did I ever make this status?"

I'm sure it does matter whether people care about it in two weeks or not - SOPA didn't really make an uproar for more than a month. Whitney Houston's death died down after about 2-3 weeks. Even still, am I wrong saying that raising awareness is a good thing? In a world where not many of us can afford to go off to Uganda on a plane, get a gun and run in all hell blazing to save some kids, I think that raising awareness is the least we can do. And if there's no point in it, why bother with things like Live Aid? That's all about raising awareness, isn't it?

I compared it to a pandemic. If people aren't aware of the disease, they won't take preventative measures and they'll die. But if they're told of it, they'll be more cautious, and are more likely to survive.

Where have I gone wrong, where does it say that raising awareness is bad? I understand that people might not know why they're doing it or understand the message behind it but if it gets passed along to someone who does - I think that's what matters. Ignorance is the enemy in this. Ignorance allows things to happen while we go on blindly believing they don't, or not even knowing they do.