"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win,” these are wise words from Gandhi that can describe what is going on in the country of Uganda.

Logging onto Facebook, the newsfeed showed Kony 2012. I wondered what it was about. At first, I didn’t understand the issue until I started talking with friends and co-workers about this, “political campaign”. This led to me to the 30 minute video on Youtube. The video struck me because it was sad to see that there were young boys and girls in Africa doing horrid things like killing their parents and other people and being sex slaves to the LRA.

Senior Jonathan DeDell appreciated the video. “It was moving. It was a really well prepared film, and it kept the audience engaged throughout the entire 30 minutes.”

Kony 2012 is a campaign to make Joseph Kony (a Ugandan warlord) famous, “not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice,” (http://www.kony2012.com/). The idea is to make him well known for what he does so he can be finally caught and captured. In 1986, Kony formed a group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and since then has abducted over 30,000 boys and girls in Uganda to be used as fighters and sex slaves or “wives” to the soldiers. Kony has taken many children in their sleep and has given them guns and other weapons to kill people, including their parents.

Jason Russell, director of the film Kony 2012 and co-founder of the group, Invisible Children, made this film to get the word out about Kony to stop what he is doing. Speculators have been asking about this campaign and the issues behind Kony 2012 and what is so important about it all. "In math you don't start with calculus, or algebra. There are complicated issues in the world, we know that... Kony's not. He's 1 plus 1. We can all agree with that. We can all agree, together, we're going to stop him," Russell says. Invisible Children has been fighting for the past nine years to stop the suffering of children and their families in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “....The world needs to realize, you can’t have Hitlers anymore,” says Russell.

To continue the fight to stop Kony, on the Invisible Children website, there are starter kits that include: + T-shirt + KONY bracelet + Action guide + Stickers + Button + Posters for a price of $30.00 The Invisible Children started this kit to raise awareness of Kony, but they have recently sold out of all the kits, although they are still taking donations for the cause.

“I thought that it was an effective method of using the social media to get their message out about Joseph Kony and why he must be stopped,” says senior Owen Hartman. Other students say that they are concerned that the focus is only on Kony, and not the LRA because they feel that without Kony, the LRA could still continue.

The thousands of people around the world who have seen this 30 minute video on Youtube and Facebook want to make a difference; they want Kony stopped. They do this by buying the starter kit and getting the word out to other people. With 688,296 hits on the 30-minute video, obviously the word is getting out. However, a recent arrest of the director on unrelated matters may have caused a bit of a distraction from his cause.