March 7

I wanted to share something different with you tonight. Here is what I posted on my Facebook status this evening, please read if you have the time.

You’ll have to bear with me on this post, I’m going to be getting up on a soapbox for this one. My Facebook newsfeed has been dominated today by people posting a link to a video for Kony 2012, a campaign by Invisible Children Inc. to shed light on the atrocities perpetrated by Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. While I think it is admirable that you have taken an interest in global affairs and wish to attract attention to this issue, the Social Studies teacher in me feels the need to add my two cents to the discussion. I challenge you to think critically about what you “like” on Facebook, dig deeper into global issues rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. Here’s what I found out about this with a little investigation:

The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady non-profit that has been called “misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.

Additionally, Invisible Children Inc. has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.

By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization.

Let’s get something straight: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is reprehensible, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psychopaths. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Joseph Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a non-profit organization that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to non-profits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another madman.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. Going about trying to solve a problem like the usage of child soldiers in central Africa as if the world was black and white just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible. Maybe some people heard about this story and looked into the topic a little bit more, which is great, but I suspect for every person that got curious about the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony there were ten others that simply “liked” the video on Facebook and posted it on their wall to show up in the newsfeed. I’m finished lecturing for today.