Last week, a short film telling the story of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army made the viral rounds on the Internet. Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter — it was everywhere.
Your news feed probably blew up with people reposting the video. It probably started blowing up again with people complaining that most of the Facebook users sharing the video were jumping on the “Save Africa” bandwagon.
The new craze became critiquing the newfound wave of social activism. Skeptics asked: Why didn’t people care before they saw the video? After all, the struggle in Uganda has been going on for years.
The skeptics asked why people haven’t paid more attention.
They complained that just because you found out about it today and decided to take a brave stand as a “slacktivist” posting Facebook statuses, doesn’t mean the problem has magically been solved.
The people saying these sorts of things have become what I like to call, tragedy hipsters.
They knew about the despicable acts occurring in other parts of the world before it was “cool.”
Let’s think about this for a little while.
If you happen to care very deeply about the plight of children being abducted and forced into service as child soldiers and you knew about the struggle that had gone on for years, unchecked, why would you be troubled by newfound publicity? How could increased awareness be a bad thing?
The problem is that looking down on someone for suddenly caring about the LRA and the child soldiers after watching a video on YouTube is an exercise in futility.
If you have to artificially inflate your self-esteem by claiming some sort of moral superiority, you just set yourself up to fail.
If you knew before, why didn’t you say something? Why weren’t you fighting for the cause? Why didn’t you contact your representative in Congress to demand action?
If you’re one of these tragedy hipsters, don’t worry.
We don’t really expect you to do all that much. We understand that if you’re a tragedy hipster, you’re desperately trying to keep up appearances of relevance.
In any case, the sheer scale of tragic occurrences, indignities and abuses that continue each day, despite outrage and sanctions against the perpetrators, is unthinkable.
While ignorance is a lame excuse at best, it can’t be any worse than those of us who did know about the atrocities going on in Uganda or Darfur, the Congo or human trafficking around the globe and then forgot about it.
We were consumed with our own lives, our own concerns. We weren’t trying to be callous, but we didn’t have much incentive to take a real stand.
Whatever the concerns may be about the Invisible Children organization and their campaign against Kony, we can all agree that there’s no need to be so snotty about the fact that you knew about it first.
Reach the columnist at skthoma4@asu.edu
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