Today, after a unanimous decision, our AP Gov class decided to go watch the Invisible Children presentation in our auditorium. As we walked in to catch the end of the movie, volunteers handed out small slips of paper, with the words "Citizen's Arrest Warrant Joseph Kony". Turning the card over, I read on and discovered that the Invisible Children have a high reaching agenda.
"We ask President Obama to do three things:
1. Commit the United States to lead an international effort to arrest Joseph Kony and announce this strategy through a public statement by Christmas 2009.
2. Commit to sign into law and implement LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.
3. Commit to the recovery and rehabilitation of the LRA affected communities in Uganda, Southern Sudan, CAR and DR Congo."
Underneath these demands was a place to sign your name, zip code, and email address to pledge yourself to the cause. Invisible Children want to present the president with 250,000 of these by mid-December, almost like an initiative petition to get him to take a stand.
I, for one, did not sign this piece of paper. Rather, I kept it so I could fully explain why. And in just as many reasons as the Invisible Children have demands, I will elaborate.
1. As much as I respect what the Invisible Children people are trying to do, this new initiative is completely irresponsible. There are better ways to help these people, without jeopardizing our own country. Their bracelet and hand bag programs are two great examples, providing the people with jobs to help rebuild their lives. With this in mind, why do I think asking the president to make an active contribution to this cause? Simple, he has other, more important things on his plate. Barak Obama is the president of the United States, not Uganda. Therefore, his priorities lie elsewhere, in places that his jurisdiction actually gets things done. We have domestic problems that we need to solve before we can make this big of a commitment to another country.
2. Does no one remember the outrage when former president Bush went into Iraq? The original reasoning was to interfere with WMD creation, but we stayed to dethrone Sadaam Hussein and solve the mass of human rights violations occurring. If America commits to trying to "solve" Uganda's problems again and attempts to right all of Joseph Kony's wrongs, it's going to backfire. We were all for "saving Iraq" until we realized that it wasn't as simple as going in and taking the worst people away. It's going to be the same in Uganda. Americans have a very short attention span; if Uganda isn't "cured" in three months, they will label Obama as a failure and an idiot. Sound familiar?
3. Obama is already being stretched too thin. Health care reform advocates are pushing him to pass health care legislation; gay rights activists are pushing him to support the LGTB community; Wall Street is pushing him to pull us out of a recession. Forcing him to take a stand on Uganda will only make him less effective. Stop badgering the President for a while and let him actually get something done. The more we put on his plate, the less he eats.
What the heck? Why wouldn't you want to help child soldiers or stop genocide? All you had to do was sign a piece of paper. Would it violate your whole argument if you did? Invisible Children is trying to raise awareness of an issue to try to solve it, much like Ghandi and Martin Luther King in thier respective movements. The main thing Invisible children does is send the message: "I want to help". All the little piece of paper was supposed to do was to get Obama to say "I want to Help". The immediate outcome of Invisible Children is hope. All you had to do was sign a piece of paper to give a little mutilated child soldier in Uganda hope. Please explain why that is wrong.
ReplyDelete1: If there are better ways, why arn't they being done? The continuation of genocide in Uganda is a testament to the failure of international peace-keeping missions and international criminal courts. Since it's creation in 2002, the ICC (THE International Criminal Court) has had Joseph Kony at the top of its list of people wanted for crimes against humanity. Kony is still out there: THERE ARE NO BETTER WAYS. The United States has yet to submit to the jurisdiction of an (and there is only one of note) International Criminal Court, undermining its authority both phisically and conceptually.
Secondly; if you don't expect the President to do anything, what harm does it cause to sign the paper? Just because he is the president of the US doesn't mean he is powerless anywhere else. If that were so, what would be the point of foriegn relations?
2: I get the point of not wanting to commit troops to Uganda. Uganda may perhaps be more dangerous than any place in the Middle East. One problem I have is your lack of faith in the people of America; a three-month attention span and a potential to blame Obama yadda yadda. But Invisible Children has already existed for 6 years, raising over 4 million dollars for the creation and improvement of eleven schools in their Schools for Schools. They are actively makeing a differnce in thousands of lives by providing santiary and safe facilities along with heat and water to children in Uganda. Not all problems are violent in nature and have to be solved with violence.
3: While Health care and gay people are an admirable cause, I'm pretty sure there is less chance for people to DIE if the LGBT movement fails. In Uganda, however, people die every day not just from genocide: some refugee camps lose 1000 people a day waiting for food and medice to reach them. The thing about genocide is that its not just a local problem. People die every day something doesnt happen. If we are so worried about unemployment and the economic crisis, why don't we pay people to go there and build schools and baby hospitals?
And don't suffer the delusion that you can't make a difference. If the movement raises enough awareness, some authority will have to acknowledge them and come up with a plan. Our US government is fully capable of brainstorming a solution to at least some of the problems in Uganda. We spent over a billion dollars on an Embassy in Iraq. Just 1/100 of that could help give clean water to all of Uganda. And why would Obama be denounced for making a statement declaring that he wants to help childe soldiers?
Although Invisible Childern was born out of the Child Soldier conflict, there are hundreds of other concerns they adress. I for one still want to help the child soldiers, but if you don't, you could still support relief efforts or building schools, something that doesn't threaten the United States domestic policy or gay people.
All you had to do was sign the piece of paper.
Signing that piece of paper would mean that I was in support of bullying our president into taking on an issue that, at this moment, is not his problem.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm not sure where you got the idea that I was against the charity, which I'm not, but go ahead and have your little rant. As I said today in class, when you so maturely refused to speak to me, I'm planning on buying some of their merchandise for Christmas gifts.
Also, if you want to read further into ideals similar to my own, check out this link:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist_moyo