As I have been explaining to many of you 'Why Revolutionaries' about how we can use the Kony campaign, and it's successes and failures as a foundation for our own campaign, I thought it was about time I explained it to a wider audience. The Kony campaign, for those of you who don't know (which I rather suspect is not very many) was an international campaign led by American charity 'Invisible children'. The aim of the campaign was to bring to justice one Joseph Kony, a Ugandan war criminal accused of countless crimes. The campaign featured a video which was viewed 90 million times in it's first week. 3.5 million people signed a stop Kony petition. This was a campaign which caused millions of people to take a few minutes out of their day, to stop and think about how lucky they were to have a roof over their heads, to have an education, and not to live in fear of their lives. This was a movement which caused millions of people to work together for a common cause. And yet this campaign is viewed by most as a complete failure, a flop. Why?
Well what it all boils down to is the way that you look at success. Most people will set themselves one target, and say 'if I achieve that thing I am a success. If I do not I am a failure.' Most people, especially in western society see success as very black and white, and I believe that this is the cause of much unhappiness. What we should try and do, a little more, is to view success as every shade of grey. So someone who sees only black and white will say 'If you did not catch Kony, then the campaign was utterly worthless. In fact, the people who work for invisible children should never have started it in the first place, because it was doomed to failure. HOWEVER if you see success in terms of shades of grey you might say 'Although Kony wasn't caught, millions of people doing something positive, even if that thing was just reposting a video, how can that be bad. People may have only spent half an hour watching the video, but it was half an hour doing something selfless'. The Kony campaign took many of us out of our cosy little lives, and got us thinking about being part of the wider world, about being part of something larger than just ourselves. We can't see the effect it had, yet that doesn't mean it didn't. You might say that the people who reposted the video were not real social activists, and were only doing it because their friends were doing it, which might be true in many cases. But that doesn't mean they didn't take something away from it. I am personally very very grateful to invisible children, because I believe what people will take away from this, not that they will all be magically transformed into saints, but that they will be more receptive to the idea of working with millions of other people for a common cause, that the Kony campaign taught people 'working together is fun'.
One of the main reason that the Kony campaign is called a failure is because the success (as I see it) was not tangible, not measurable. It's like a child who studies for two years for an exam, then is sick on the day, and the teacher saying 'because you do not have a grade you are a faliure. Unless you have the grades to prove you have an education then your education is worthless. But the girl has the knowledge, the same knowledge as someone with the grades, she just can't prove it. And this is like the Kony campaign. Just because we can't 'see' the positive effects cohesion, just because we can't see co-operation, doesn't mean they aren't there. And I believe the Kony campaign did make people more receptive to working together.
Working together is the only real defence that most of us have against oppression. Without people working together, using social media, the Arab spring could not have happened, and whilst the problems in the middle east are far from solved, the Arab spring demonstrations helped ordinary people to regain a feeling of control over their lives. What the Kony Campaign has done is made each one of us realise, deep down, that we are not powerless. Kony made history, and every single person who took part was a part of that. If we continue to work together, to spread positive messages, by using Facebook, twitter, and word of mouth, who knows what a difference we might be able to make?
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