I sponsor a child in Sierra Leone. Have done so for years. I've also given quite some money to various 'Doctors without frontiers' initiatives and other things. I do care. Don't think that I don't. And the Kony 2012 has nothing to do with pop culture getting behind something.
1) Pop culture has already forgotten by now. The 5 minutes of facebook fame are over.
2) Even when it was on their minds, they still didn't care that much.
3) The people behind this seem to be living out a white savior fetish.
If you want to do something, find a solid initiative (in my case that was
SOS Children's Villages International - A loving home for every child ) read up on it, and if you feel like making a difference, and engage in a continuing commitment. I cannot solve the world's big problems, but I can make life better for a small girl who is currently making it through school on my dime.
In this world, for some reason, the people with money (with the exception of rare people like Bill Gates) just don't care.
We, the middle class, may care, but we have no clout. We may want companies to act decently, but companies answer to stock holders, and stock holders are people wanting to increase their stock value. They don't want their profits to drop because companies pay fair price for humane working conditions. And consumers don't want to pay more for their shiny new toy.
I am not making fun of the problems. I am making fun specifically of the Kony 2012 marketing campaign, and
the idea that those problems exist because the world doesn't know. the world does know. It just doesn't care.
Let me tell you a story about one of the worst monsters in human history. A man nicknamed 'the butcher king'. A man compared with whom Hitler is an amateur in the field of genocide. The name of that man is Leopold 2 of Belgium. Due to some political maneuvering, he
personally owned Congo, right at the start of the Industrial revolution. The world needed rubber, and Leopold delivered. He supplied the world with rubber, got insanely rich (IIRC he was at one point the world's richest man). and killed between 8 and 12 million African slaves in the process. That number is without counting the people who got maimed and tortured to make an example. We are talking about true evil.
But the world needed rubber, so the world didn't care.
Eventually, it became a political booboo and his enemies were seizing this abomination to beat him over the head with. It was grotesque even for that day and age. And then the miracle happened. The great forgetting. Because Leopold at that point deeded Congo to the Belgian government (before, it was his own). And then Belgium started getting the proceeds. and overnight, all opposition was silenced as if smothered with a pillow.
No more inconvenient news. No criticism. It was not even mentioned in our history books until fairly recently. Many people even in my generation don't know. Or they're even believing that we brought them 'civilization' and 'education'. As recent as 2002 (iirc) we minted a commemorative coin for that SOB. He even got a new statue in some city near the coastline. Can you imagine Germany minting a commemorative coin for Hitler? And Leopold was worse than Hitler.
Individuals may care. The majority doesn't,
especially if they benefit by the atrocities.