After being away from a com­puter, a TV and pretty much any means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for five days dur­ing my vaca­tion to Florida, I didn’t think I had missed too much fuss in the news over spring break.

Shortly after check­ing out my emails and the hot top­ics online after com­ing back to Michigan, I was struck with the story about Kony 2012.

If you haven’t heard of this yet, Kony 2012 is a cam­paign started by Invisible Children, a U.S. Charity, in order to raise money to aid in the cap­ture of Joseph Kony.

According to the film cre­ated by Invisible Children, Kony has been charged with 12 counts against human­ity and 21 counts of war crimes includ­ing a forced recruit­ment of chil­dren soldiers.

Kony has eluded cap­ture by the Ugandan gov­ern­ment for almost 26 years. During those years more than 30 thou­sand chil­dren have been abducted for Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

The video stated this inter­na­tional injus­tice didn’t directly affect the United States, and our gov­ern­ment wasn’t plan­ning on becom­ing involved. This was until about five months ago when 100 U.S. advi­sors were sent to aid the Uganda Army to find and cap­ture Kony.

Since then the cam­paign has con­tin­u­ously grown. The Kony 2012 YouTube video posted March 5 started with a few views and grew to 65 mil­lion. Invisible Children hopes to make Kony famous world­wide for his actions to cre­ate a big­ger aware­ness of this dis­turb­ing sit­u­a­tion to stop the violence.

Celebrities such as Rihanna, P Diddy, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie are even sup­port­ing Invisible Children’s cause through their Twitter pages.

Some YouTube com­menters say this cam­paign is a scam and fund­ing this cause is only pro­vid­ing Invisible Children employ­ees with a salary. Those com­menters are miss­ing the big­ger pic­ture, the part about child abduction.

The whole sit­u­a­tion is dis­gust­ing and so ter­ri­bly sad, espe­cially since it took more than 26 years to shine a light on these hor­ren­dous actions.

Then there are other arti­cles crit­i­ciz­ing the video say­ing it doesn’t accu­rately describe the his­tory of the Ugandan gov­ern­ment over the past 26 years.

According to the Huffington Post, “Invisible Children said in a state­ment posted on its web­site that it does not defend any of the human rights abuses com­mit­ted by the Ugandan government.”

Twelve counts against human­ity and 21 counts of war crimes doesn’t just appear overnight, like the views on the YouTube video.

Whether or not Uganda is cor­rupt or the Invisible Children staff is get­ting paid, let’s look at the big­ger pic­ture: If the alle­ga­tions against Kony are true, he needs to be stopped. It’s sickening.

Related Posts

1. Cartoon February 29, 2012
2. Cartoon March 14, 2012
3. Cartoon January 25, 2012
4. Cartoon February 1, 2012
5. Cartoon February 8, 2012