Did you see the Invisible Children Generation?

(For those of you reading this via-Facebook, you will find this more accurately formatted on my blog. krcarson.blogspot.com)

Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible. Doug Larson


Being born in 1981, I am a part of many who first graced the world with our presence in a year that will forever be caught in transition between one generation and the next. Depending on the book you buy, the tv special you see, the website you look up, or the blog you read, we may be the tail end of Generation X, the very beginning of Generation Y, or given another label altogether. Most of us will identify more with those who came after us than those who came before, but beyond that, we have a myriad of generation options to choose from. Today’s late teens and twenty-somethings, have been given so many labels that it’s rather a moot deal now. We (or those a few years after 1981, depending on whose calendar you’re looking at) are known as, oh let’s see…the technology generation, the me generation, the MTV generation (MTV was birthed in 1981), the nXt generation, and the social justice generation, among others. We are, it seems, the most self-absorbed and most other focused of any generation in the last century, maybe ever. We’re a generation full of paradoxes, but this week, I got to see the social justice generation rise up. And with a loud cry, they demanded to be heard and moved out in action. In real, life-changing action.

Uganda, as those who know me know, is a place very dear to my heart. In 2004, I spent two months in a village just outside the south end of the capital, and gained valuable relationships out of it. As any good traveler does, I did some research into Uganda. I may have gone a little farther than most, admittedly, but once I get researching on something interesting, anyone is hard pressed to stop me. In this research, I learned many things about Uganda’s violent and distressing post-colonial history and its current status. I also learned that the area of Uganda where I was traveling was one of the safest places on the entire continent to be a foreigner in due to recently passed strict laws (as in, capital punishment) on theft. But I also learned that not all of Uganda shared in this sense of security.

Less than a year earlier, three young filmmakers from Southern California had decided to look for a film-worthy adventure in Africa. With no real plan, they set off for Southern Sudan, in search for whatever may be there just to discover there was nothing. And so they wandered further south and into northern Uganda where they stumbled upon what the UN has labeled the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and the worst crisis nobody outside the area knows about.

Following the fall of Idi Amin, Uganda remained in bitter conflict for years as groups jockeyed for power and control. This guerilla war was ugly and vicious, but in 1986, it finally ended, putting Yoweri Musevini in the presidency. He has remained in power, and has kept southern Uganda in relative stability up through now. But in 1987, another group formed, and the most brutal war on record has waged ever since.

The Lord’s Resistance Army fights in active rebellion against the Uganda government, with one great exception: it never actually fights government forces. This army, more easily known as the LRA, began under the bizarrist of circumstances. First begun by Alice Lakwena, the LRA was under guidance of what they believed to be a prophet of the Holy Spirit of God. Lakwena believed the Acholi people of Northern Uganda should fight against the new government and what she believed was its unholy religious manners, denouncing witchcraft and other “spiritualisms” that were long ingrained in the culture. Unlike what the LRA became, Lakwena did not believe in violence against civilians and when Joseph Kony took over leadership after a battle caused Lakwena to flee to Kenya, she disapproved of his methods. And this is where the story of the LRA turns especially brutal and tragic. Born, like Lakwena, in the Acholi tribe, Kony recruited members of his tribe to fight. But Kony’s methods began to turn the Acholi tribe off to his desires. Kony quickly turned on his own people and began pillaging villages, raping women, and killing like the mad man he is. When Acholi people refused to fight, Kony took on a method beyond the comprehension of many and one employed by a number of armies in Africa—he began to raid villages and kidnap the children in order to force them to fight. Under the threat of death, the children are forced to kill, and to kill in the most horrendous of ways. Boys are forced to give their lives and allegience to the LRA and girls are abducted as sex slaves. The first of these raids happened as early as 1987 at the Sacred Hearts Girls Boarding school in what has now become the infamous Gulu region of northern Uganda, and many have been reported since, all the way up to the Christmas Day massacres just five months ago that numbers the victims as possibly up to nearly 500. Thousands of Ugandans have been displaced to refugee camps in their own country, and thousands of children have been abducted and forced to fight in this rebel movement. It is reported that 90% of the LRA’s forces are child soldiers, the youngest of which is recorded to have been five years old.

In shock and dismay, the young Californian filmmakers built relationships, filmed hours and hours of footage, and came to know more and more about the devastating effect this war has had on the Acholi people. Upon returning home, they put together a film that was passed simply by word of mouth through the states, and an outcry of injustice and a desire to help poured in and the filmmakers began to build what is now known as Invisible Children, Inc.

Invisible Children holds with it multiple goals. In northern Uganda, they have set up the hope to build new schools, create new ways for the ravaged Acholi women to make money by creating jewelry to sell around the world, and continue to help get scholarships so the Acholi children who have no money for school but all the desire in the world, can gain an education. In the western world, they work to bring awareness to the people and to put pressure on the governments of the world’s super powers to stop this war once and for all by looking for accountability among African leaders.

Uganda’s government has made attempts to capture Joseph Kony and to stop the atrocities of Northern Uganda, but not as much as they should. In the last two years or so, peace agreements have been signed and broken, but Kony’s elusive existence makes him virtually impossible to find. Due to exceedingly more pressure from the Ugandan government, the LRA has moved into Northern Congo, the country bordering all of western Uganda. The previously mentioned Christmas Massacres happened in Congo (formerly known as Zaire), a country that itself has been witness to horrible wars that have killed over four million people in the last fifteen years or so.

While in Uganda, the filmmakers discovered a discomforting story about the Acholi tribe’s children. Because it was too dangerous for them to be in their homes at night, many of them would take the long trek out of the bush and into the city to sleep together in the schools and warehouses, and so Invisible Children began a yearly awareness building event called Night Commute, an event to ask people to come together for one night, take a long trek to the nearest participating city and sleep together outside, no matter the weather, and remember the children who have had to do the same thing, night after night, all of their lives.

But this year, Invisible Children chose to do something a little different and a whole lot bigger. Inspired by the Acholi people of Uganda and the Freedom Riders of the United States’ civil rights movement, they created an event called The Rescue. Leading up to the event, participants were given a list of “moguls”—politicians and stars—to contact through publicists, government offices, and YouTube videos and to ask these people to come “rescue” them. The people contacted would then, hopefully, contact Invisible Children and get the information on what it meant to “rescue” the cities, and were given a special statement to read that would rescue the city, where upon, specified “Rescue Riders” along with anyone else who wanted to become one, would ride to the next unrescued site and join again in the effort to be rescued. And so on April 25th, 100 cities around the world banned together to call out to our policy makers and bring a voice for the voiceless, and they refused to leave until they were rescued. Thousands “abducted” themselves and gathered together in sun, rain, lightning storms, clear skies, warm temperatures and cold from San Diego to Edinburgh, Chicago to Sydney, Vancouver to Miami and together they wrote letters to their senators, talked together about the conflict, and slept in their sleeping bags underneath the same sky. Stars came out in many cities to share in this momentous event. Jeff Foxworthy joined up with Atlanta, as did John Lewis, an original Freedom Rider, who rescued them. Kristen Bell and Tom Arnold, among others, came out to Los Angeles. Edinburgh was rescued by Billy Boyd who plays Pippin in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Australian actor Damien Walsh Howling rescued Sydney. By the end of the weekend all but a dozen cities had been rescued, and those left were in for the long haul. Rescue Riders in the states were beginning to make cross country treks as the nearest unrescued cities began to be farther and farther away. Those of us who wanted to be there but couldn’t watched it all live online largely via Cameron Woodward and Marcus Price at the Invisible Children San Diego offices.

On Tuesday, Las Vegas was finally rescued by Mel B (Spice Girls’ Scary Spice), and by the end of Wednesday, Richmond, Virginia, had been rescued by Gavin DeGraw, leaving only one city left, and Rescue Riders were on their way from all over the country via Wichita, Richmond, and Spokane, Washington, to Chicago where the people there had been weathering rain and storms.

Those in Chicago had decided if they had waited this long, they were going to leave only when one of the biggest names of them all came to their rescue, and so Chicago was holding out for President Obama, Vice-President Biden, or mega-star Oprah. Why Oprah? Because no matter what you think of her and how much you do or don’t agree with her, you can not deny her reach into millions of homes every week day and the power her words have. By Thursday, Chicago was building its numbers from those it had lost due to weather and school, and nearly 500 had gathered. The three filmmakers had made it from their respective cities and decided to get creative. They were hoping for Oprah, and so one of the filmmakers, who had gone to school for dance and choreography, choreographed a song for all 500 participants and after a few hours of practice, the crowd began to make their way to Harpo Studios where Oprah films her show and where they knew she would be.

1200 people tuned in online to watch what Invisible Children worker David could only describe as “epic.” At approximately 4pm CDT, the Invisible Children advocates began to beat their drums (literally), gathered in formation, and danced an amazing choreography with an amazing African sounding song spun from a famous U2 song. As they began to sing in unison people began to stop and watch, and as they were singing, “In the name of love—Oprah, come and rescue us!” those from Oprah’s studios who could see and hear them from inside came to watch the spectacle. In three different locations around Harpo they marched and sang this song, pleading with the media mogul and chanting “Rescue us! Rescue us!” and “Together we are free! Together we are free!” On the Invisible Children site, if you looked at The Rescue’s homepage, you would see the statement of unity that no city is rescued until every city is rescued. Those of us online watched as the crowd outside the studios hoped for the best, and when the police showed up, we were all severely disappointed that no rescue had happened and yet deeply inspired by such an unexpected work of unity on the ground in Chicago. We wondered what would happen. Chicago had been waiting for six days to be rescued. We online had donated thousands of dollars to feed the Rescue Riders and grand amounts of time glued to the computer screen. Calls were made to find churches for them to stay in at night, and we all (virtually present and physically present) wondered what would happen now.

But there was the chance for once last effort. At 2am CDT, the Chicago Rescue Riders awoke at the church they were in forty minutes away in Munster, Indiana, and by 5am, they were back at the studios where they lined themselves all the way around the building and stood quietly with peace signs in the air, hoping and praying that today would be the day they get to go home. For the next few hours they stood, waiting and hoping, and then a buzz began through the crowd, and something, they knew, was happening. It was not Oprah. But it was the one person they knew could get to her. It was her best friend Gayle, and she came bearing cupcakes, to top it off. Their voices had been heard. Oprah films and airs her show live on Fridays and soon Oprah came out, to everyone’s surprise. She didn’t stay long, but when she walked back into her studios, she had the three filmmakers with her. Turns out, she told them, she had no idea they’d been outside her studio yesterday. She had heard of Invisible Children before and even given them small publicity a few years back. When the filmmakers came back out, they brought amazing news. Oprah was so interested in what was going on that she revamped her show to give the first ten minutes or so to the cause.

If you tuned in on Friday, you got to see what I’m talking about. As the crowd stood quietly outside, Oprah sat in her studio and spoke through cameras to the filmmakers who shared about the cause and the next step of action beyond this. They told her viewers about the atrocities in northern Uganda and surrounding areas and shared their goal to stop this war and belief that it was entirely possible for them to do so. Oprah shared her own knowledge of child soldier abductions and strongly encouraged her viewers to visit the Invisible Children website, which promptly crashed the site because it’s not equipped for Oprah level traffic. When the interview was over and Oprah continued on with the rest of her show, the crowd outside was in shock. They had not only finally been rescued and freed to go home, but they had been rescued by Oprah on live TV with millions of people watching. The cause had been heard. And it had been heard by over seven million people. This was an unbelievable end to an unexpectedly crazy event. Few had really expected Oprah to come through, and it was the faith of the few that caused the many to see.

But it’s not over till Joseph Kony is captured and the rebel army is stopped. What is most encouraging about Invisible Children is the intelligence behind the emotion. In June, they (along with two other organizations) will train those who are able to put down the money to learn how to lobby and then will do so on the steps of the capital of the United States of America. They will ask for President Obama to gather the leaders of the powerful western world and the leaders of the African nations to finally put a stop to an army that has been allowed to pillage and kidnap and murder for twenty-two years too long.

And when they are finally heard, they will work with the Ugandans on a very long road of rehabilitation. The social justice generation has risen to action. With God on our side, we will stop this war, and we’ll ban together at any length to make sure of it.