KONY 2012

I've spent a month and a half hyper-aware of borders. I'm called an "اجنبية" ('agnibea,' foreigner) in the street. I talk to men at the refugee center about how they want to travel to the United States, aware that I have a passport and will pass easily through customs. I do not understand the language of most of my fellow students when they talk to one another, or the feeling in the knots of people that form on street corners or the demonstrations of people in Tahrir. Even as I am geographically close, I am always and obviously removed.

So it came as a shock to watch a video that promised that I (and 750 million other Facebook users) are "not thinking in borders." It came as a further shock to learn that in this new, un-bordered era, I can change the world. Have you seen this? Or read about it? I'd like to write about it today, if that's okay. It's not directly related to Cairo, but I don't think it's unrelated, either.

"You're asking "who are you to end a war? I'm telling you today: 'who are you not to?'"--Jason Russell

I am not going to solve the questions of the Arab Spring. I am not going to end violence against women. I am not going to stop the Lord's Resistance Army. I don't know how. But there are people who know how to begin.

If living in Egypt--and living anywhere--has taught me anything, it's that the things that I don't know could fill more 27-minute videos than I care to imagine. I don't know what to do when violence extends beyond the cruelty of one man and into the structures of the state. I don't know what international military intervention means for Uganda or the DRC. I don't know how it feels when a child soldier returns home. 

This is privilege. As an American with access to resources, including the Invisible Children's action website, it doesn't matter that I don't know the answers to those questions. As the video reminds me, I have a voice. I have influence. I have the power to spread my opinions, however limited my knowledge and my vision. 

I think that was another reason the video shocked me: everyone looks like me. (All of the pictures here are screenshots from the video.) This is the picture that played during the narration "But it's not about Jacob, and it's not about me. It's about all of you."

Is this our lesson in social justice: that Western college students have the power to change the world? This is privilege, the mindset that lets us ignore the central question: If we have power, who doesn't? 

Who doesn't speak in the video? Well, to begin with, more than three Ugandan adults, all of whom have fewer time on camera than Russell's young son or George Clooney. Who cannot view the video? Anyone who doesn't know English, apparently, not to mention anyone without a computer. Who is not asked to participate? Anyone who can't "sign the pledge", "get the bracelet", or "donate a few dollars". Can we begin to imagine how much we are missing?

"What we do, or don’t do, will affect every generation from time to come…We are not just studying human history. We are shaping it...The better world we want is coming. It's just waiting for us to stop at nothing."

Who is shaping the world? Whose world do we want? I would like to advocate, as an American college student with a fondness for scarves, glasses, and political buttons, who would possibly fit in quite well in this video, for a world that is decidedly not the one I want. I'd like to hear about a world shaped by people whose languages baffle me, whose opinions contradict mine, whose stories I struggle with and whose movements make me ask hard questions. This isn't a world that I can change in 27 minutes or a year or three steps or two bracelets. It's a world of borders and foreignness and challenge and hardship, but, I truly believe, a world of infinite promise and infinitely intersecting stories. And no campaign and no video and no confused words of mine can ever be a fitting testament to that.