Sigh.

I've tried to keep my head out of this whole Invisible Children extravaganza, but too many people I thought would feel as I feel are throwing dollars, facebook statuses, tweets, etc., toward the organization's Stop Kony and #Kony2012 campaign. I couldn't keep quiet any longer.

I used to very much support the dudes at Invisible Children. I used to send them money until actually pretty recently (mostly because it was NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to cancel my monthly donations. But that story is for another day). In high school, I think some friends of mine knew them or something--they're San Diegans or UCSD grads or something. And then at CLU, their van rolled up and they played their film and I cried 10 million tears and bought a t-shirt and probably told everyone all about it all day. They are nice people who want you to care about child soldiers.

And believe me, I care about child soldiers. No side of this argument would say otherwise.

But what worries me about Invisible Children is the "how" of the situation. They began with a few guys getting on a plane to central Africa with nothing but a camera. This is an amazing way to make a documentary. But once they made the documentary, I think they needed to hand off the heavy lifting to people who understand the intricacies and complexities of government, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, war, the UN, the ICC, etc., and all the other pieces of how our world works in a legal fashion.

I do not claim to be one of these people. And that is precisely my point.

I commend Invisible Children for their adventurous beginnings (nearly 10 years ago) and for their commitment to raising awareness. I condemn Invisible Children for their call for US military intervention and support of militias in CAR, DR Congo, and Uganda.

I am not arguing with the idea that Joseph Kony's army of children is horrible.
I am not arguing with the idea that something needs to be done about this.
I am not arguing with the idea that knowledge leads to power.

I am arguing with the idea that a bunch of vigilante documentarians have the ultimate solution to wars that have threatened a Central Africa for generations. Posing with automatic weapons and new African militia friends is not my vision of justice.

And how white and how imperialistic is it to assume that we will swoop in and save the day?

Furthermore, I worry that this focus on Joseph Kony, the man, is dangerous. "Making him famous" inadvertently makes him famous. Who it does not make famous are the individual boys and girls who have lost their lives and will lose their lives in the LRA. Because of media coverage, we know Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmner -- and not to mention those given clever monikers like Jack the Ripper and Son of Sam. These people are infamous -- the names of their victims forgotten.

I just worry that what this viral campaign has done has implanted the words "Joseph Kony" into the minds of  American Facebook users, and done little else but fund a single organization that may not be the solution.

The following authors describe in detail the questionable expenditures, non-profit rating, philosophies, etc., of Invisible Children in a way that I could only hope to paraphrase. Please read these, and the financial section of the Invisible Children website, and any information about CAR, DR Congo, and Uganda that you can glean from reliable sources.

The Problem with Invisible Children's Kony 2012 -- Michael Deibert

Solving War Crimes with Wristbands: The Arrogance of Kony 2012 -- Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub

Visible Children -- Grant Oyston

Kony is Not in Uganda (And Other Complicated Things) -- Joshua Keating

[The S]tree[t] of [Cro]cod[il]es

I haven't been feeling much lately.

I didn't know it until just now.

I just sat down to read a book, Tree of Codes, the latest creation from one of my favorite human beings, Jonathan Safran Foer. What's amazing about this book is that it is part of another, The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, who I'd never heard of before but now understand as one of the most important authors of the 20th century. JSF took Schulz's book, his favorite book, and by process of exhumation, erasure, scissors, literally, physically cut out the words that were not part of this story, leaving this story only.

It's as brilliant as it sounds.

It's 134 pages, and it just took me about 25 minutes to read because it's one or maybe two sentences per page. Do you understand? It's mostly cut-away.

I've got to read The Street of Crocodiles now, because I need to know from whence this came.

But as I read, even though the pages sort of catch on each other and you've got to go slowly because the sentences don't necessarily make literal sense and yet they're beautiful poetry, I began to see the story coming to life in my mind. And quickly the cut out ceased to distract me but rather contributed to the brokenness of the story it told and I was there with Father and Mother and the crowd and the city and sky and the masks and lies and the whole world.

He's a genius, I'm telling you.

I began to cry, as I am wont to do when I read something just so. I am in awe of the power of the human mind and human soul to create something such as this. Normally I would be appalled that someone had cut a book to pieces but instead for The Street of Crocodiles it is precisely the fate of this text to have been cut apart to become Tree of Codes, I think.

Lately I have been getting a lot of my schoolwork done and being fairly serious about it. I haven't been going out much because I am reading, instead. Or exhausted from the thinking, instead. Or exhausted from the weight of the world around me. The world is a place, I've said.

But having read Tree of Codes tonight has reminded me that the world is a place. The world is full of brilliance and feeling and beauty and pain and death and love and life and fear and people and things and words and wounds and trees and books and water and smiles and me.

The words of Tree of Codes are on the page in a way that is different than any other book and therefore come off the page in a way that is different than any other book.

This is what it feels like, I think, to feel.

Everyone complained about this reading but I am loving it.

What is that something which makes transformation possible in the midst of chaos and hopelessness? What is there that finds us, trapped inside the box of our own thinking with no possibility of breaking out, and moves us to open to an act of creation?


As Martin Heidegger says, we first have to assert the possibility of creation as a possibilty. Without any possibility of possibility, we surrender to what is, and assume that's all there could be. But that conundrum is a wheel within a wheel. Where does the first act of creation come from to create the possibility of possibility?


In the end, we have to proceed as if possibility is a possibility, even when we don't see it or even believe it can exist. This is an act of pure faith, based on nothing, itself born out of a pure declaration that it is. No evidence. No proof. In fact, there is usually lots of proof that what we want cannot be done. If what was needed was clear and seen to be possible, it probably would have happened already.


In the creation story in the Bible, it says in one translation, that "God's intention moved over the face of the deep." I like that! That's a clue of us. If we can simply find in ourselves some intention and take that with us into the darkness of not knowing, an act of creation becomes possible. According to the yogis, we have in us the capacity for being an "uncreated cause," and I wonder if the writers of Genesis weren't referring to this when they said that we are "made in the image of God." This is not something we have to make happen; it is already present, or even better, here within us, just there, an arm's length away, like the "kingdom of God at hand," waiting to be appropriated by an act of faith.

[Scherer, J., "The Role of Chaos in the Creation of Change," The Chaos Network, 2003.]