Fighting To Stay Relevant

Like most people, I was swept up in the Kony phenomenon early last month. For those of you who aren't on Twitter, the #Kony2012 movement was a video which was posted online by a filmmaker named Jason Russell which told the brutal story of Joseph Kony, who has been kidnapping children and forcing them to join his army in northern Uganda, resulting in tens of thousands of lost children, known as the Invisible Kids. The video hoped to both raise awareness and bring Kony to justice. Almost overnight the video was an unbelievable success, being watched by over 30 million people within a couple of weeks and has now been viewed almost 90 million times. Suddenly Jason Russell was all over the place, doing interviews with everyone under the sun and making some real progress for his cause. Unfortunately one of the places he also showed up was in San Diego, where two weeks after the video was released he was detained for indecent exposure after what was people close to him deemed as a mild mental break brought on by exhaustion and stress. After that you didn't hear much about him (save for a spoof on "South Park") or Joseph Kony, the world moved on to another story and the kids on Twitter moved to another viral video. To be honest, I kind of forgot about Kony after that.

So, imagine my surprise on Saturday during my Flat Stanley adventure when I was walking through the Boston Common and saw "Kony 2012" written everywhere. It had been drawn in chalk on almost every surface imaginable and while some people had just drawn the words, several of them were part of larger, more elaborate drawings. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on, as I kind of thought we were done with Kony and doubted they would have lasted since last month with the rain we have gotten lately. A little bit of digging revealed they were part of a campaign known as "Cover the Night" designed to keep the story of Kony in the spotlight. Supporters were encouraged to go out and do charity work during the day, then put the logo on any surface they could legally do so once they sun had gone down. Sounds like a positive way to keep things going, but while I was looking in to the story I also found out that outside of Boston it didn't appear to have had much success and even in town some people had gone a little too far and spray-painted "Kony 2012" onto some monuments. If they were looking to catapult themselves back into the national discussion, this wasn't the way to do it.

I applaud the Kony people, not only for having a cause which totally deserves more attention than most things we decide are important in this country, but also for trying to keep it in the public spotlight. Too often we move to a new problem before we actually fix the old one. And, unlike the "Occupy Boston" people who were here in the fall and winter, they have a clear message of what they are trying to accomplish. But that being said, I think they waited too long to having this follow-up activity. I'm sure part of it was to make sure enough time had passed from the Jason Russell's arrest so that wouldn't be what everyone focused on, but it is a fine line between waiting for the dust to settle and waiting too long. In this day and age the period between caring what people say and then forgetting who even said it is getting shorter and shorter. That is great if you find yourself in the middle of a scandal (Seriously, bring up Roger Clemens to someone this week. People are way more angry that the government is going through with a second trial than they ever were about him allegedly lying to Congress.), but not so much when you want to keep an important, though not particularly sexy, issue in the public eye. They should have done this last month, when the spotlight was the brightest.

Activism is really just marketing without a product people have to buy, so the question here is how they plan to keep the cause moving forward. Since the ultimate goal is to have Joseph Kony arrested and brought to trial by the end of the year, my guess is they were planning to do once event like this a month. First off, next month's event has to be better coordinated. The "Cover the Night" project was just supposed to be done at the local level with no official meetings planned and we saw how well that worked out. It also has to be better hyped. If I'm fairly plugged in to social media and if I haven't heard about your event until a full five days after it happened than clearly a few avenues were left unexplored. Thus, I'm going to humbly suggest they step up their efforts. As the old saying goes, you should dance with the one that brought you - they got all this attention because of a short film, so even though sequels usually fall far short of the originals I think they had better get to work making another one. And, if all that fails, Jason Russell could take off his clothes and start wandering the streets of various cities in America, because sex will always sell and it seemed to get him the most attention last time.