slacktivism353

Jason Russell.

Sometimes, I despair for humanity. I wonder what drives people to be so cynical and negative.

The public reaction to the Kony 2012 doco has been overwhelmingly positive, yet critics have been quick to pile in, casting mostly baseless aspersions on the motives of the filmmaker, Jason Russell, and his advocacy group Invisible Children.

Where does the money go, people ask, linking to a uni student's blog entry about the group's fund-raising activities that points out "only 32 per cent" of monies "went to direct services, with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production".

Others (and in the interests of balance I included this quote in the original post myself) cite Foreign Affairs magazine, which alleges Invisible Children, Human Rights Watch and World Vision "have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA's use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony - a brutal man, to be sure - as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil."

World Vision - there's some scrappy company.

The point of the Kony 2012 campaign is to raise awareness. As Russell told Australian TV on Thursday, his group's focus is two-fold: to help on the ground in Africa and to make known the people's cause in that continent.

The first goal has been worked at over nine years, with schools and an early-warning radio network built to alert villagers to the movements of murderous soldiers.

The second goal they have also achieved spectacularly and, incredibly cost-efficiently, if you add up the vast amount of publicity the group has generated.

Yet people rush to call Invisible Children "dodgy" or "disreputable" while ignoring one irrefutable fact.

Yesterday, you did no know who Joseph Kony was, nor did you have any idea that he was the was most wanted war criminal in the world according to the International Criminal Court (I'd link to their website but it seems to have crashed with the volume of pesky traffic it is now receiving.)

Now you know who Kony is.

What is that worth?

How much money would you reasonably expect to spend to make a tiny, unknown conflict a talking point amongst millions of westerners?

Ten million dollars? One hundred million?

Compare that to the entire $9 million that Invisible Children has apparently spent on its advocacy, rebuilding and education programs in the last year and with the global PR and advertising budgets spent on say ... toilet paper, caffeinated soft drinks or cigarettes.

I wonder how people can argue that it's not money well spent?

Commentors claiming this is somehow "dodgy" or "poorly targeted" remind me of indviduals who won't sponsor an African child because only fifteen bucks of their fifty make it to the impoverished kid and their family.

So what? We don't give them the $15?

Others, like commentor "Dave" on this blog argue that "it would be far better to lobby to bring a bit of proper government and education to the region that has seen an estimated 3 million or more killed over the last 14 years, most of whom have died in ways that are no more pleasant than those bestowed by Kony. Kony is not a one off - he is a product of his environment. If you really care about this, you should be taking action about that."

This is an argument akin to saying if you want to treat AIDS you just need to hand out condoms and teach people about safe sex. However, if you have HIV already, tough shit, we won't bother figuring out how to treat it, we're just going to prevent it.

The genie is out of the bottle with Kony. Yes, proper government and education programs are necessary to prevent the rise of despots - but what about the children Kony still has in his army? Should we forget about them?

Commentor "Hired Goon" says, "I switched off [the movie] because I found it difficult to watch a film where a tourist makes a story about civil war about himself. He just seemed like such a narcissistic prick doing a bit of cheap manipulation," while others criticised Russell for using his son in the film.

The point - as I saw it - was to personalise a distant people, to ask the question "how would you react if this was happening to my or your children?" but others perceived this as some kind of ego trip (which the guy has dedicated nine years of his life to).

Commentor "stttmz" alludes to the fact the campaign is trying to leverage pressure and publicity off the upcoming US Election like it's a bad thing - like getting politicans to commit to promises to garner votes is some kind of nefarious tactic invented by the dastardly manipulators at Invisible Children.

In the end, I have no doubt that filmmaker Jason Russell is a bedrock-solid good person and more than a few people are watching his incredible work with a sense of revulsion for themselves as they fritter away their one life on the planet.

We constantly criticise Generation Y for being apathetic and having short attention spans, yet when hundreds of thousands of young people do get together to try to make a difference, we then call them "naive" or "slacktivists" whose idea of social change is sharing a video on Facebook.

I've written this blog since 2006 and I have never been more disgusted by the responses to a post as I was yesterday.

If you'd like to read answers from Invisible Children and Jason Russell to many of the other questions posed by commentors on this blog and elsewhere on the web, please go here.

Sam de Brito's latest novel Hello Darkness is in bookstores now. You can follow him on Twitter here. His email address is here.