Kony 2012 and a very bad proposal

Lately life has been extremely busy and I'm out more than I'm home.  In a way that has been nice; I miss the rapidity of my undergraduate life.  However, I've slumped so far into doing nothing a lot of the time that I'm really starting to miss a lot of my alone time and TV time.

So in the little spare time that I do have, I often check Facebook or watch an episode of some god awful TV show on Netflix.  Lately, Facebook has been taken over by this "Kony 2012" craze.  I'd like to elaborate on many of the comments that I have left (potentially on your) walls and get my friends thinking theoretically, practically and conceptually about what the Kony 2012 campaign is trying to accomplish.  I'd like to acknowledge that I appreciate the spirit of the video and I appreciate the want of people to get informed about issues happening all over the globe.  That being said, the Kony 2012 campaign has also brought up some serious concerns that I feel cannot all be addressed on one photo comment.

1) If I could compare the Kony 2012 campaign to anything, it would be raging hormones.  Except replace hormones with early post-colonialism.  The constant personalization, the use of "we", and the comparisons to conditions in North America makes it a fairly traditional "white man's burden" or "white guilt" type of video (thus, as far as I'm concerned, the film's intention is not to inform but rather to make you buy into an idea).  World Vision is probably the worst I can think of for using this technique to keep their business charity running. Essentially, it makes you think about all the wrong that white people have done, or all the things that white people could have done to alleviate certain negative situations in the former colonies (especially Africa). Middle-class people tend to be pretty lazy, but they have such high amounts of guilt that they feel the need to donate to these causes they know nothing about to make themselves feel like they are making a difference in the world.  I also hate how it is implied that "we" have to save these people. It's a shame that this attitude and mindset is still so prevalent.  If you're big into discourse analysis, I'd love your take on the post-colonial aspects of the Kony 2012 video.

2) The video does not contextualize the situation in Uganda.  Dude. Just... Look up something on Ugandan history. The implied support for President Museveni throughout the video makes me nauseous.  The Ugandan military has also used child soldiers in the past against the LRA and other neighbouring countries, such as the DRC. A major problem in the North American psyche is that we always have to look for a good guy and a bad guy and this video makes no exception to this (possibly for the sake of clarity, again proving that this video has no intention of informing).

3) The video implies support for American military intervention in Uganda.  Did you support Iraq? Probably not. But hey, the Americans were there to get Saddam, yes? Ruthless dictator, killed lots of people, yes?  So why the hell would you support a mission in Uganda when the principles will be identical to that of Iraq (except there is no monetary gain from being in Uganda aside from the "war is profitable" principle).

I'm not saying you should agree with me, but I want you to do is think about it. De-construct it for all of you post-modernists out there.

ON A CHEERIER NOTE:

Proposal writing is failing miserably. Nothing on paper yet. Blrrhh.