I've been voting for Kony for years!

There's a lot of scuttlebutt about Joe Kony (as I call him) over the internet recently.

And while a lot of it is either firmly in the sort of savoir-complex a lot of what I've been seeing a lot of knee-jerk anti-Western sentiments sewn into the topic, as well. There's just a lot of emotions for the wrong reasons flying about and most of them can make you into kind of a jerk.

It's an odd subject to have feelings about-- but I read this article that analyzed the situation and the response, and there was one quote in particular that leapt out at me. It seems like it summarized this whole thing much better than I could have (and about as good as I would like to):

This certainly doesn’t mean people shouldn’t watch the video, like it and share it and it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t feel passionate about making a difference. But before you like and share you need to question. Question the organisation and its motives and funding, question the timing and more importantly question what you now know about northern Uganda that you didn’t before watching the video.

In general we should all frown upon murder and torture and the like. I kind of want to get into some of the stupider things I've seen on Al Jazeera's comments page, but I don't have the energy and I think that momentum out of the subject at hand*. We should also do our best not to get sanctimonious about people who want to stop these kinds of things. This isn't an indy band you can claim knowledge about before hand, this is something that actually matters.

Awareness and "Liking" something isn't enough to make a change and it certainly isn't enough to understand the topic at hand. We can all do more in either case to make the world better. To simply take a poor opinion to something is not an acceptable accomplishment.

I don't know. I've probably said to much, so I just just reiterate one of the maxim's I try to live by, which is: Don't be a dick, please.

We can all at least agree on that, right?

*I'm seriously glad that I didn't see a comments page filled with anti-Semitism for once. . . thought it did have a couple of moments of bizarre homophobia.