Kony2012, a video about the Lord’s Resistance Army in Sudan and its guerrilla leader Joseph Kony has been front page news for the past couple of weeks. Originally posted to YouTube on March 6th, it has been viewed more than 65 million times. Within hours of the posting, however, a controversy erupted about the documentary maker and his motives.
Emily Bullard, a student at the University of Kansas wrote of her confusion about the controversy in a column in the Denver Post. Her initial reaction was to send financial support to Invisible Children, the group sponsoring the video. But no sooner had she sent her $10 than a wave of blogs and tweets criticizing appeared to vilify this group as manipulative and dishonest.
Emily might be forgiven for her confusion. With the constant stream of conflicting information competing for everyone’s share of mind, I think we all long for the time when issues were vetted by the media or some knowledgeable body before being released as accurate and authoritative.
This got me thinking about how difficult it must be these days for young people to synthesize all the conflicting information thrown at them 24 hours a days. It is human nature to look initially for the good in seemingly tragic situations. But for every one that enters the national conversation these days, there always seems to be one or more individuals determined to question the hero’s motives, no matter how pure.
In past twenty years we have witnessed an evolution in American society’s beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad appropriate and inappropriate. As soon as someone challenges the premise or accuracy of a sympathetic story they run the right of being shouted down or being labeled as villainous because their questions don’t accept the popular narrative . In many cases, it becomes almost impossible to make an informed decision especially if you have grown up in the present environment of half-truths and hyperbole.
I find it unsettling that the emerging generation is coming of age in such a relativistic society that the differences between right and wrong and moral and immoral are melded into one big mass of confused principles. At what point will our society begin to return to the set of beliefs upon which this nation was founded?