I imagine by now you have seen "make Kony famous" or "Kony 2012" or some such derivation floating around whatever Internet feed you call your own. It's a campaign started by
I hadn't heard of Kony yesterday, but as of today, I can't even tally the number of shares, retweets, @, and via's which have sashayed across my eye-line. Recently it was the Susan G Komen fracas. A few weeks earlier it was SOPA and PIPA. A few weeks before that, it was Occupy this or that. All along, with every scroll, every "open in new tab", every cutting graphic, every online petition bellowed through the Internet megaphone, there was one empty, dull question on loop in my brain, "what is this accomplishing?"
Knowledge is power, and nothing quit turns up the pressure on a cause or individual quite like a meme bounced from every media outpost. But somewhere, this incessant memeing has been confused for action. Posting a video on your Facebook page is a token gesture. Tagging yourself in a photo someone took on their iPhone the afternoon you spent at you local occupy protest holding a "JOIN US" sign is an act devoid of any real meaning. These things are so much more using a cause as a magnifying glass on yourself, than an examination of the cause itself. After the video is posted, what do you do then? What is your contribution or commitment? What real devotion does this act of showing take, and the more pertinent question, how do you measure the impact of your minimal effort? In likes, or shares, or comments? A rather narrow life for such a good deed.
In Ken Kesey's "Tools from My Chest," originally published in "Last supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog," he makes a brief reference to young protesters throwing bricks through the front window of the Berkeley Bank of America as "kids playing with barbie dolls." I read this when occupy was at fever pitch, and the few words hummed in my brain like a tuning fork. In a child's imagination, these play things can be imbued with such narrative and sincere feeling, the self indulgence tied up in the act becomes lost on the participant. Today, at the rate information travels, these barbie dolls are picked up and put down at a feverish rate in a very public way. This is, to me, one of the most damning downsides of these rapidly spread and as quickly forgotten viral causes and beliefs. Each creation so meaningful, yet each creation so impotent, each proceeding bandwagon effort is in danger of being cheaper and cheaper to the people in your Internet periphery your are trying to inform in the first place. Since we're trading in cliches today, there is the well tread old saying, "If you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for everything," to which I would posit "But if you stand for everything, do you really stand for anything?"
Another consideration is how selective these outbursts can be, and the real people left behind in their wake. A few months ago there was a horrible crime committed in the community I live in. A woman's life was taken from her by a predator, and the outpouring was tremendous. So many in my immediacy took this tragedy and refashioned it as their pet cause. Instantaneously, this tragedy was taken away from the people it belonged to--her, her actual family and her friends--and transformed into a trend. Stickers and t-shirts were made, benefits were put on, strangers went and visited a stranger's graffiti mural in her honor. The suspect's poorly sketched picture was run up the flag pole. In the maelstrom, the actual human being was lost. Everyone else's "me" and "I" took her place. It all became so inverted, so self involved, it was as though this human life was reduced to the ephemera generated in the flashpoint as opposed to the spark of life it was intended to celebrate.
Less than a week after this woman's death, an older woman, a sex worker, was pulled out of a dumpster, her remains in a suitcase. No one knew her name. She got no trend on Twitter. She went overlooked. Perhaps her life choices made her seem closer to that demise, but it was still a human life thrown away in senseless and brutal sex crime. But of all the people vested in this other tragedy, all of the hammered out posts about "No more violence against women," this person was so far beneath the view of these thinking and feeling masses, so unworthy of concern, she was just another dead prostitute.
The viralization of SOPA and PIPA got those in congress to back off, and the pat-on-the-backing ensued. NDAA sneaks through unnoticed, and there was hardly a sigh of indifference. Susan G Komen rethinks its cuts in planned parenthood funding, and women's health care gets obliterated on the state level. Joseph Kony gets his slick looking 30 minute film, and the masses weep and wail and gnash their teeth, yet the people of Syria are falling in scores in a fight with their own government without as much as a half-assed demotivational poster. It's not that one issue is more or less important than the other, it's that the ideas become codified. The big picture becomes about who has the best interface and most intriguing hashtag. What's important about these issues shifts out of the realm of cause for concern, and slides into the morass of media curb appeal. It becomes a battle of who can control the story, the enemy of meaningful change, and just becomes more marketing.
I understand it's impossible to hold out for a movement or belief that is free of flaws and hypocrisies. There is no way to follow every dollar of every charitable donation. One would break their brain if they tried to keep abreast of every injustice. All altruism is, in part, an act of selfishness, but if these acts ceased, the void left would cripple an already cruel world. Instead, mine is more of a hopeful nod to reflection. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a concerned person. I can admit it, and my indifferences are not to be commended, but I can acknowledge the smallness of my contribution. I don't need this act of showing to take place for an actual commitment to a cause or belief. Instead, I would implore people who believe they care to think of the minute power of a click versus the dividends of an act. Think about the larger issue of which an immediacy might be a mere symptom. To reassess the magnitude of a real--hands in the dirt, I dug a fucking well in Africa, I informed and empowered myself--devotion to the things which make you feel anything.
The Internet has become a beat up Chevy truck where everyone can slap the most vacuous, digestible, bumper sticker ready version of whatever they believe--that week anyway--and cruise down the information super highway a visible and concerned citizen. This is a vacuum where ideas are gutted of their value and transformed into parodies of themselves, and if you really believe in something, it deserves better. I understand some human being more principled than myself has every right to sneer at me and crow, "Oh, so I guess we should do nothing!"
But I would respond, free of cynicism, eyes set on theirs, "No. You should actually do something."
