Like any other year, this year's 4/20 was a day to celebrate the use of today's most popular drug: cannibus. But just over a month ago, it was supposed to be a day of widespread activism.
March's Kony 2012 video, which attracted 88 million YouTube views, marked Friday as the date for its "Cover the Night" campaign. The goal was to have citizens from across the globe plaster posters, stickers, and paintings of warlord Joseph Kony to spread awareness of his crimes.
I decided to find out how the movement worked out the next morning. After walking around North Campus, I only came across two Kony 2012 posters.
The movement failed, at least at UB, anyway.
I wasn't ready to blame the lackluster turnout on student apathy just yet, so I perused the Internet to see if other areas had similar results. The Guardian reported that the campaign flopped in every scheduled location in North America and worldwide.
I'm not sure if this is hindsight bias or not, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that "Cover the Night" was doomed from the start.
Anybody can blame this on the general apathy of the youth, but using age as a scapegoat is too easy. Invisible Children targeted the college-aged demographic, and I feel that it is the organization's responsibility to find a way to prevent such a failure from occurring. I do believe that the cause was a genuine one, but at the end of the day, the blame really falls on them.
I believe the biggest problem of the campaign was that it sought to sensationalize. It's impossible to suddenly get college students to be all-in for a widespread viral video.
A more reasonable route would be to establish campus organizations or perhaps city chapters to make the idea more tangible. It's wishful thinking to believe that a one-night outburst of activism is going to happen within just one month of introducing the idea.
The sensationalist aspect of it involves giving evil a face. Most college students have familiarity with some sort of injustice going on in Africa. The video made Joseph Kony the symbol for all those injustices. It basically said: "Here's the bad guy. Here's the reason for society's problems." For 30 minutes, it sought to essentially simplify justice.
But it was just too novel. The fact that such a villainous character would show up conveniently with a plan to stop him announced in such a high-budget film was just all so thrilling at the time. Most media outlets hit the nail on the head when they described the campaign as a "sensation."
However, a sensation just doesn't work with today's generation. When you take a drug (let's say marijuana to keep this 4/20 theme going), you get a sensation, a feeling, and it goes away. The same thing is happening to the Kony campaign.
The other flaw with this campaign concerns Invisible Children itself. An organization has to continue to be proactive in order to continue such a movement. But I got the sense that Invisible Children was just surviving after the fraud allegations. They just fell by the wayside after co-founder Jason Russell's lewd public outburst.
Of course, some of the movement's thunder was taken away by the Trayvon Martin case. It may be because of America's short attention span, but I'd argue this change of focus is justifiable. How can we fix the world's problems if we can't fix our own? Would you use a hammer without a handle to hit a nail?
I do think Invisible Children will learn from its mistakes. Any organization with the ability to make something that can grab the attention of more than half of America's young adult demographic has some serious rhetorical ability.
But for now, critics are smirking in the quiet night.
Email: brian.josephs@ubspectrum.com
