By Melody Hwang, Timothy Christian School, Piscataway, NJ
I remember the second KONY 2012 videos started popping up on my newsfeed. Used to the short Youtube snippets of 5 minutes and under, I looked at the 30 minute long video, looked at the stack of homework next to my laptop, looked back longingly at the so captivating play button, realized how much homework I had, and postponed the watching of the video. Eventually, I watched the video and shared it to the rest of my 700 Facebook friends.
I think it is safe to say almost every single American high school student has been impacted in some way by the KONY 2012 wave. Whether it was heated discussions in classrooms to jokes on 9gag, we, as the younger generation, truly made Kony a household name.
The KONY 2012 campaign demonstrates the amazing, magical powers of social media. One extremely well-made and heart-wrenching video made us all feel connected to a bigger picture. For once we liked leaving our comfort zones. We liked zooming out to see this imagined scene of happy, cheering people coming together to make a difference in their world. We liked seeing hipsters draping beautiful, could-it-really-be-hand-painted signs on city walls. We liked feeling like we could somehow be involved in capturing a criminal and making a global impact. We thought it was a very good idea to get involved.
But since the initial March 5th posting, the hype has slowly faded out. But KONY 2012’s “Cover the Night” event is Friday, April 20th.
According to Invisible Children’s website, during “Cover the Night”, people will cover streets and entire blocks with KONY 2012 posters. The plan is that America wakes up Saturday night to a world covered with KONY posters and demanding his arrest.
“Cover the Night” is Invisible Children’s first offline action. And there leaves a question of how successful their campaign will be off the web.
What will the Kony 2012 campaign result in? That amazing video left us all wishing to help out and hold an African child’s hand. But could we really leave our paved sidewalks and brownstone homes to do something? It is easy to pledge support over the comforting anonymity of the computer or to buy and proudly wear a wristband. It’s another thing to actually get up in the middle of the night when your friends all label the idea of plastering posters all over town as boring. And even if the streets of of your local town, New York, Boston and other major cities are covered with posters, what happens next?
Come Saturday morning, no matter what the results of “Cover the Night,” I hope that this mentality of of coming together and making a difference carries over to every day life. Whether it be with Kony or other villains, I hope there is a day when we don’t need an artistic video to tell us we need to step up and make a change. When we don’t need organized campaigns and events to compel us to pursue justice, then evil is being truly defeated.
