The conflicts
Invisible Children are focusing on are the atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA). I learned that this is a group of
fundamentalist Christian’s who have abducted children, destroyed villages, and mutilated
women in northern Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
Central African Republic. Unfortunately, we’ve all
heard this general story before. With the acceleration of media, we are constantly bombarded
with images of suffering. It’s reached a
point of diminishing returns. We’ve been desensitized to suffering. Kids will see a moving story about poverty,
only to tab back over to Facebook and complain about how much homework they
have.
There
are two ways to solve a problem. Using
the medical field as a metaphor, there is “diagnostic care” and “preventative
care”. One focuses on mitigating the
effects of a disease already in the body, the other focuses on stopping a
disease or catching it early before it requires the diagnostic care. Both are critical parts of staying
healthy. The problem with my generation’s
desensitization due to disaster porn is that we never understand the roots of
any of these problems. The most we’ll do
is donate some time or money… as if that was a sustainable way to deal with
every problem that comes up. Don’t get
me wrong, these are noble acts. It is necessary,
just not sufficient. It's like eating junk food and exposing yourself to harmful radiation because you know you have a good doctor to deal with the consequences later.
We need “preventative care” for atrocities
like those created at the hands of the LRA.
This requires first understanding where these atrocities come from. After reading through some articles on the LRA,
the points relating to geography naturally stuck with me. It turns out, the conflict is a result of the
same “hunter gatherer vs. agriculturalist” struggle that has been recurring for
thousands of years. The LRA represents
the ethnically Northern Ugandans (historically hunter-gatherers) and their opposition
to the Southern Ugandans (descendants of Bantu farmers). Was this conflict destined to happen just do
to the fact that one region was more fertile than the other? This is obviously a gross simplification of
the issue: there’s colonialism, religion, poverty, and a whole lot more
contributing to the crisis. My point is
that using this counterfactual analysis, we can find common themes. For me, geography is the most compelling. The “hunter gatherer vs. agriculturalist”
conflict is present in lots of manifestations of violence, whether it is the
oppression of natives in the United States or our current destruction of the
environment. Using these overarching phenomena,
we can develop new ways for dealing with them in order to prevent future
instances of suffering. For
example, promoting the use of cultural knowledge from indigenous populations can
both help us be more environmentally friendly while breaking down social
divisions.
What do
you think? What sort of new ways of engaging with the world can we adapt to
prevent future atrocities?
I read this interesting article a while back that addresses some of your questions. It says that public notice is the first step to attending to and preventing other atrocities from happening. But that is not enough because like you said, people get distracted with things like Facebook and all the other events taking place in the world. So it is important for governments to be able to develop solutions even while people aren't paying attention. One problem may be that policymakers are often left with a choice between military intervention and doing nothing. I guess it would be most important for governments to develop affective responses first. Politicians don't typically campaign on such issues, but maybe they should. Perhaps if Washington showed more interest, then so would people and other countries.
ReplyDeletehttp://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/beyond-kony-how-to-prevent-atrocities-before-they-happen/
I thoroughly agree that it is vital that some sort of "preventative care" solution is found. People have been reduced to relying social media as the extent of their involvement; from texting to donate money or liking and sharing on Facebook, "retweeting" on Twitter, and such actions. And while these actions does make us aware of a certain event or issue,it only does so for the brief time it required, and left behind as users scroll to the next item of interest. Because these issues do not personally affect us, we believe we have done our part of taking action by "retweeting." On a greater scale, this is a responsibility that our government should show interest in. But rather than seeking preventative policy against such issues, our government should make calls to make an international standard or policy for "preventative care." For our government can only shoulder so much. But if Washington can take action in conjunction with the government of other nations, a viable "preventative" solution can possibly be found but also sets up a difficult international standard that few may be willing to cross. However, taking preventative action can only come as a result of identifying an issue or area before it metastasizes into something requiring diagnostic care. This too requires international cooperation for countries not to ignore issues because they have greater items of concern, but to at the minimum alert other nations that such a issue exists. Taking such steps can help to find preventative solutions.
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