IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ! - Stop Joseph Kony

What would you do if you saw your brother or sister getting killed? What would you do if you were forced to kill your parents? What would you do if you had to escape, night after night, just to not get captured by people who will force you to kill others?

For us this is absoltely impossible to imagine what it has to be like and every single one of us knows that it is wrong! Sadly, this does happen. There is a man out there forcing children to kill their loved ones. A man by the name of Joseph Kony. Whats even worse is that no one knows about him, he is completely invisible to the world. To this day he is still out there committing these unthinkable crimes, and no one is stopping him. We must stop Joseph Kony.

But what can we do to stop such an injustice? We can make his name known. We can spread the word. We can make the world see him. I may be just one voice, but with this one voice I can tell countless others, who in turn, can tell even more people. We are lucky enough to have our one voice. Now lets use them to help the people who cannot be heard.

Please take 30 minuets out of your day to watch this video. If you don't have 30 minuets, then please watch as much of it as you can.
www.kony2012.com/sharefilm/

We can make a difference! We can change the world.
Even if you cannot get deeply involved with the Kony 2012 movement, even if you do not have the money to donate towards the movement, it doesn't cost a thing to spread the word. Post this on to Facebook, Twitter, or to your fellow friends on Deviant Art. Do what ever you can to get the world to see Joseph Kony. Use your one voice to make a difference. I am going to do whatever I can to put an end to Joseph Kony, what about you?



- - Edit - -
I know that some people have been questioning if Invisible Children is a trustworthy organization after reading the article that can be seen in yuumei's journal here, yuumei.deviantart.com/journal/… I was questioning it a bit myself when I first read it. I then realized that this article is the testimony from one person. Out of the billions of people in this world, why was I letting this one person shake my resolve to help others?

So what did I do? I did what everyone should do before they send money to any organization, I did a little research of my own. I found a link to a mans Note on Facebook. www.facebook.com/notes/john-ru… I read through what he had to say, and then visited the site where he found some of his information at, www.theresolve.org/blog/archiv… I find that the man has many valid points on the issue and the place where he got his resources seems legit. To get another opinion I found this blog post here cur-non.blogspot.com/2012/03/k… that also challenges the article in question. I am not the only one out there doing my research, fellow deviant ToxicAlice92 also has researched Invisible Children and has a lot of information for people to read. Please read through her journal here,  ToxicAlice92.deviantart.com/jo… I have also found an article on Yahoo News about the criticism of KONY 2012, news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/kon… with in it, a former Africa director in the Bush administration National Security Council states his opinion on the critiques and shows his support for KONY 2012. Note that these are opinions of different people, but they are opinions that have been formed only when the author got all of the facts.

I next looked into the financial side of Invisible Children. I found this at the Charity Navigator site, www.charitynavigator.org/index… and another at GuideStar, www2.guidestar.org/organizatio… Or if you have the time, you can go straight to the source and view Invisible Children's Financial Statement for June 30th 2011 and 2010 here c2052482.r82.cf0.rackcdn.com/i… Also, all of Invisible Children's Financial Statements can be found here, www2.invisiblechildren.com/fin…

Countless times and places, I have heard that Invisible Children does not send a lot of the money they raise to the victims. I decided to do my own math and see if it was true or not. By using the information provided by Charity Navigator (link above) I did some simple math (divide total expenses by total revenue), I found that Invisible Children spends around 65% of their revenue. Correct me if I am wrong, but that would mean the other 35% is what is donated. Out of pure curiosity, I decided to try this little equation on a well-known and trusted organization, say, the US National Peace Corps Association? What I found shocked me. Using the same equation, I found that the National Peace Corps spends 86% of its revenue. Leaving 14%. I do not wish to belittle the Peace Corps, they do a wonderful job, they probably build more schools than Invisible Children do, I just found this very interesting. Feel free to try this little equation on other organizations and see what you find.

If that still doesn't satisfy you, here is the response that Invisible Children gave to the criticism www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/b… and www.invisiblechildren.com.s3-w… Just to make sure I got both sides of the story, I decided to go straight to the article that had shook my resolve in the first place. What I found was that the person who wrote the article is Grant Oyston. Oyston is a sociology and political science student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is no expert, and says so himself. Oyston even admits that there is flaws in his post. You can see for yourself here, visiblechildren.tumblr.com/ I have found other critiques on Invisible Children, ilto.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/… being one. But please note that this critique was originally written several years ago. Another being in the Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world… this article is written by one person and quotes several bloggers. All of the critiques I have found so far have been blog posts, articles that quote bloggers, or other personal articles. I have yet to find any hard-core evidence proving that Invisible Children is a fraud. The BBC did do an article about how Invisible Children is being criticized, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-afric… but BBC themselves never came out to say that Invisible Children is a scam.

No, Kony is not currently in Uganda. But nor is Invisible Children focusing only in Uganda. You can see here www.lracrisistracker.com/ that Invisible Children are also helping the Congo and Sudan, where Kony and the LRA are believed to be at.

If you are still not sure what to think, you may want to look here, lifehacker.com/5891726/how-to-… I also found this article that gives the opinions of both supporters and critics alike www.guardian.co.uk/politics/re… I will warn you now, it is a bit lengthy. There is a lot to read in that article.

Please read through all of the information I have provided here first, and then form your opinion once you get all of the facts. But by all means, do research on your own, what I have here is only a small portion of what is out there. If you find anything of importance, please tell me. I will be more than willing to listen to what you have to say. I want everyone to form there opinions once they get the facts, not be misguided by only having one side of the story. So I will continue to update this journal with information that I find.

Am I telling you to go give all of your life savings to Invisible Children? No. Donating money to Invisible Children is optional, no one is forcing you to buy their posters. You can make your own posters if you want to. All I want to do is to spread the word about Kony and what he is doing. After all, the first step to solving a problem is knowing one exists. Is KONY 2012 the only answer? No. The world is not written in black and white. There is probably other ways to go about this. Do I know how to go about it? No. I am no expert in political science. What I do know, is that through every article that I have read, both critics and supporters alike, they all had one thing common. They all agreed that Joseph Kony was a bad person. No one doubted that. The reason I support KONY 2012 is because they are actually doing something about it! They are not sitting around talking about it like a lot of people are. What they have done is informed the world of Kony's existence. I know that I would still be ignorant of Kony if I had not seen that video. If you don't think that KONY 2012 will solve anything, then stop attacking Invisible Children and lets start working together to find the right solution! How I see it, everyone is so focused on the legitimacy of Invisible Children, that they lose sight of the real issue here, and that would be Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army.

This is my opinion on the KONY 2012 campaign and Invisible Children, and I will continue to support KONY 2012. You are free to form your own opinion, but no matter how you look at it, Kony must be stopped. Even if you do not support the KONY 2012 campaign, please at least spread the word about Joseph Kony, not just the KONY 2012 campaign.

- - Edit - -
KONY 2012 has made world news! I would like to thank everyone who has shown their support and helped get KONY 2012 on the news! A special thanks to my crazy sister, Moon-gleamer who sent a link of this journal to so many people, that DA considered it spam.



- - Edit (August 2016) - -
I was looking back through my journals (I really don't have many) today and decided to read through this one. This journal is oddly special to me, I was always the quiet one, normally just keeping to myself, and this was the first time I actually used my voice to try to do something good. I spent hours digging, trying to find some good information from both sides of the conflict, and then spread it across DeviantArt to help those who were confused as I was, so people could come to their own conclusions about KONY 2012, instead of just being influenced by the people around them. Though something a friend of mine said during the KONY 2012 conflict has stuck with me for the past four years; "Don't post about it just to make yourself seem like a good person, when in reality you'll forget within a week that Kony and others like him even exist." 

I think that this statement is true for most people who got caught up in the KONY 2012 excitement. Those who know me personally, know that I am a stubborn person, so I was determined to not be like the others and just forget about Kony within a week. So I would occasionally get on to Google and see what Invisible Children has been up to. And that is what brings me to this journal again today, to continue what I had started in 2012. So many people on DeviantArt came to my journal to find information. It only felt right to update it to include the aftermath of KONY 2012...

Joesph Kony is still out there. So I guess in a sense, KONY 2012 was a failure in that aspect. Though because of that insane movement, his army has been greatly reduced in size and he has lost a lot of his commanders. Communities are better protected by him, and some of the lost children are coming home. So in that aspect I feel like it was a success. You can read up on it some more here

I am sure we all remember how Jason Russell, one of the founders of Invisible Children, and creator of that viral video that started this craziness, went running through the streets naked and had to be taken away by the police. I know some people questioned me about it here on this journal while I was still updating it. I had always felt that Russell's outburst was brought on by the intense pressure brought on by being the spokes person of KONY 2012, and I never belittled him or Invisible Children for that. Not only did KONY 2012 make Joesph Kony famous, it made Jason Russell famous too, and not everyone can handle that fame. Though during my random Google search I found a 2013 interview with Russell, that goes over what exactly happened during KONY 2012 and the year that followed. It is a bit lengthy, though I found it an interesting read, and of course I will post it here for you to read. It is a highly detailed article and it shows just how human Jason Russell really is. Humans are flawed creatures, and Russell lays all of his flaws out there for everyone to see in this article (www.theguardian.com/world/2013…), so hopefully we can not judge him for his one negative outburst in 2012, and make our views of him as a human being and his accomplishments as a whole, both good and bad. 

For those like me who do not wish to forget that Joesph Kony exist, The Guardian does a wonderful job time lining what Kony is up to and when he surfaces in the news. You can find it here and go through all of their articles involving Kony. 

People will either look back on KONY 2012 with either pride or disgust, though it was a viral movement that affected many people. For a journal that was once talked about all over DeviantArt, this edit will probably go unnoticed, but for those like myself that do not wish to forget, please leave a comment, I would love to talk to you and see what your findings are. I have always been open to other opinions, and if you have found something I might of overlooked, please let me know so I can update it into this journal. After all the very purpose of this journal was to be a gathering of information, both good and bad. It would not feel right to leave it incomplete.

I want to again thank everyone who supported me when I first created this journal. And I am happy to say that I am one of those people who look back at KONY 2012 with pride.