Despite critics, support causes you care about

Invisible Children and its Kony 2012 campaign have hit social media like a storm. The goal of the campaign is to make warlord Joseph Kony famous in hopes of capturing him.

The campaign has been criticized over the financial spending of Invisible Children. The majority of the earnings raised for the campaign have been spent on raising awareness and filmmaking.

I understand why this would upset some people, but raising awareness is what Kony 2012 is all about! Putting money toward raising awareness for a campaign that is about raising awareness makes complete sense to me.

What really upsets me is some people are insulting others for wanting to help. Even if Kony 2012 turned out to be the biggest crock of nonsense, it is down right cruel to bash people for wanting to support something good. People found out about something evil that was going on, and so they wanted to help.

Why is this terrible? If people found out about something evil and turned their heads, then we have a problem. If someone wants to donate a few dollars a month, then let them. Nothing is wrong with raising awareness. I don’t recall people getting nasty over people wearing Race for the Cure attire or sex trafficking bracelets.

Someone told me I wasn’t helping any children by changing my Facebook profile picture. I was criticized for caring and told my efforts did not matter.

If this is the kind of message we send about raising awareness, then what does that say about other efforts? If people are being put down every time they want to help, pretty soon they just won’t help anymore. What a wonderful world it will be when that kind of thinking spreads.

It’s perfectly all right if you don’t want to support Kony 2012. There are so many causes out there that it would be impossible to support them all. Philanthropy is amazing because it shows we care about the world and are willing to help. It’s definitely not cool to bash people for the issues they do support.

Kony 2012 is a good cause. They are trying to raise awareness about children being mistreated. Even if Northern Uganda has already changed for the better or if Kony is not even in Uganda anymore, spreading the knowledge that something horrible did happen and that the man is still out there somewhere is worth changing your profile picture for. We should not have to live in a world where we are criticized for caring.