Kony2012 was about the effort to stop a man named Joseph Kony in Uganda from kidnapping kids and forcing them to fight his wars and becoming sex slaves. The maker of the film, Jason Russell, started out describing how he had met Jacob, a former foot soldier for Kony. When Jacob and Jason had met in Uganda, Jacob had just escaped from Kony and was running with a few other kids. In the next few weeks, Jacob had told Jason how he would rather die than keep living because he couldn’t go to school, his brother had been killed, and he saw no happy future in his life at which point he broke down and started sobbing. Jason told him that he would do everything in his power to stop Kony from abducting children and from killing their families. When Jason got back to the U.S., he decided to meet with government officials to discuss what measures could be taken to start the effort to find Kony. However, he was rejected, and told that the government would never get involved in anything that didn’t threaten national security or the nation’s financial benefits. Turned away, he didn’t give up and went around telling as many people as he could about Kony and Jacob, and slowly a program called Invisible Children was formed. Invisible Children’s goal is to stop the LRA permanently from killing, abducting, raping and displacing Ugandan children and their parents. Slowly Invisible Children (IC) began to grow, organize and spread information about Kony to other people. Then in October of 2011, the IC went to the government again to talk about Kony, and got Obama to sign an agreement to send about one hundred soldiers into Uganda to aid in the capture of Joseph Kony. However, Jason elaborated on how the soldiers could be called back at any time, and that people need to make as many people as they can aware that Kony is committing these crimes and that he needs to be stopped.
After the video, I immediately started chiding myself for not wanting to watch this video on the excuse that I didn’t have enough time. It was touching, heartbreaking, and it’s good to see that we can still get the government to do something if we put our mind to it. I often noticed how Jason used aspects from his own life in the video, such as involving his son, and that made me feel that it was actually him that wanted to make a change to a world that he didn’t like and not just a group of people who are trying to get money. The short clip of Jacob crying because he saw no future in his life amplified and legitimized that feeling and made even more people want to help. Another thing that struck me was how often he used numbers to back up his argument. How many children had been kidnapped, how long Kony had been abducting and killing, how long we have left to catch him...it gave me and others a perspective on a lot of the things that Jason talked about and made it easier to understand. Also, he compared the children’s lives who had been abducted to our lives through his son Gavin. That showed people how drastically different the way we live and the view that we have on life than that of the people living in Uganda. We go to bed worrying if we finished all our homework if you're in school or how much a new television might cost. The people in Uganda go to bed worrying if they’ll live another day or be shot within the next twenty four hours. This radical difference between cultures makes a lot of people want to change the way Ugandans live for the better to close the gap.
