New Voices: By and about young adults

Like my students and I, you probably stumbled across a viral video entitled “Kony 2012” in the past month or two. Even if you didn’t, I’m willing to wager you’ve heard the name.

In case you’re in the latter group, here’s a recap: Kony 2012 is the name of a video—as well as the movement inspired by that video—produced by the nonprofit organization Invisible Children that invites you to:

1. Care about the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), against children in eastern Africa, and

2. Make Joseph Kony famous by plastering the world with “Kony 2012” posters, writing politicians and appealing to celebrities, so that

3. The United States will continue to give military support to the Ugandan army to hunt Joseph Kony down.

If you noticed the massive success of this video, you likely noticed the resulting backlash—countless editorials criticizing Invisible Children’s oversimplification of the issues, naïve solutions and financial integrity. You probably also heard something about the presumed impact of this criticism on Jason Russell, the director/narrator of the Kony 2012 video and one of the founders of Invisible Children, when he was detained by police and diagnosed with a temporary psychotic breakdown. One moment, it felt like the world couldn’t wait to kill Joseph Kony. The next moment, everyone seemed ready to dispense with Jason Russell instead.

Where do we fit in? It seems worthwhile to note that Kony 2012 left many of our North American Mennonite communities without the choice to opt out. When a movement gets this big, even a nonresponse becomes a response. The tragedies reflected in Kony 2012 are precisely the kind of thing Christ calls us to care about. We shouldn’t respond just because a viral documentary tells us to, but we also shouldn’t ignore injustice for that reason either.

Kony 2012 is a reminder that we live in a world of fast, passionate and polarizing information. It also may be a chance for us to examine how to live in a time that produces dialogues like it—dialogues we didn’t start or even ask to be a part of but that we are a part of simply because we exist.

Then how do we respond? When my students and colleagues watched the video, we felt some combination of inspiration and concern. We wondered about the faithfulness of labeling Joseph Kony an enemy. We wondered if there was something colonial about Invisible Children’s approach. And we definitely wondered about the faithfulness and wisdom of appealing to the United States to further use its military to help the Ugandan military hunt Kony down. When the public started to turn on Invisible Children and Jason Russell, it seemed like a welcome opportunity to just forget about it.

Still, so many of us also felt inspired, and the tragedies are real. So what does that mean?

In the end, my students concluded that we’re not called to buy completely into the Kony 2012 movement, but we’re not off the hook either. To paint Joseph Kony as disposable evil and to support a militaristic manhunt is to buy into the myth of redemptive violence. Yet to see Invisible Children’s breakdown as evidence that they’re worthless is to buy into a subtler but still-prevalent violence as well. Jason Russell seems to be yet another casualty of media and society that want us to find villains and applaud their downfall. Just as it was right of us to question Russell, it’s also right to question the way society has abandoned the good in what he called us to.

When an issue in our culture gets this big, we need to care and show that we care, and we need a Christlike approach. Thankfully, Christ’s teachings against violence allowed us to ask the right questions when the video came out and to stay committed to its potential good when the filmmaker’s popularity declined.

What does this mean? For us it’s meant this: We’ve decided to raise funds for Concerned Parents Association (www.cpa-uganda.org), a non-profit started and run by Ugandans who are affected by the LRA’s abductions and who are dedicated to addressing these atrocities nonviolently and holistically. Do we worry that this may be naïve, oversimplified or colonial in its own way? Absolutely. But we also trust that our faith community will continue to discern with us either way.