Kony Island and Candy iPads: Activism in 2012

Let's review the timeline: on March 5, the American activist and advocacy group Invisible Children posted a 30-minute video called Kony 2012. They put it on YouTube, Vimeo, and their own site. On Tuesday March 6, my Facebook newsfeed was suddenly flooded with friends imploring me to watch this video. Watching it, some said, would be the single greatest piece of activism I would do that year. On Wednesday March 7, Twitter trends included buzzwords from the film, including #Kony2012, Stop Kony, Invisible Children, and Uganda. As of the time I write these words, the video, having gone undeniably viral, has been seen over 19 million times.

You should watch Kony 2012. It's about Joseph Kony, the leader of Central/North Africa's LRA, an army made up primarily of child soldiers who have been kidnapped from their families and forced to fight. It's about Jacob, a former Ugandan child soldier who was befriended by Invisible Children and rescued from his seemingly inevitable suicide. It's about Invisible Children, who is calling for a day of action on April 20, and to do "whatever it takes" for Kony to be out of power by the end of 2012.

It's a gorgeous piece of social media - a lot of whizzing camera effects and animated photos, a friendly voiceover and a cute little kid. Invisible Children has given us all a clear action plan: buy the Kony 2012 kit (it comes with stickers and posters!), and then take to the streets in April. By plastering Kony's name and face all over the world, leaders will be forced to realize that their people care about this issue, and be moved to rectify it. There are lots of shots of young people standing in solemn groups in front of American national landmarks, fists raised in solidarity. The music builds to a frenzy as those young people take to the streets, covering their faces with thuggish bandanas as they paper their cities with pre-made posters of Joseph Kony.

As I was watching it, I felt myself going through all the usual reactions to a beautifully made viral video - the story is moving, and the film's editing and effects are a golly-gee wonder - but when it was over, I had weirdly landed on anger. There were issues with the video.

For a movie ostensibly about Uganda and Ugandan people, there were surprisingly few speaking roles for actual Ugandans. I got the sense that Jacob, the friend of the filmmakers who featured prominently, was supposed to represent the experience of all the child soldiers - not exactly the best way to honour these people's stories. There was also a brief moment, a throwaway shot, of a quick pan up the hierarchy of the LRA to the top, where Kony's face had been plastered. Getting rid of Kony, Invisible Children promise, will erase the potential for the LRA to continue their horrific campaigns. But every army has its platoon leaders, its lieutenants, and who's to say that once Joseph Kony has been removed, some other despot won't move in? It's not like assassinating the President dissolves the country of America - there are structures in place to keep power and rules. The LRA has been in operation since the mid-1980s, and I'm sure at some point, a contingency plan has been prepared.

But Kony 2012 isn't really about Kony - it's about the movement Invisible Children has created to stop him. The video is only the first step: newly mobilized viewers are then encouraged to log on to Invisible children's website and purchase an action kit. Shoppers get all the tools they need to "Cover the Night:" a teeshirt, a consciousness-raising bracelet, stickers, posters, a button, and an Action Guide. It costs thirty dollars, and you can buy a larger kit for $225. In the video, riot-cop worthy crowds of people - most of whom are under thirty - stand in their matching anti-Kony tees; quick cut to a shot of them taking to the streets and plastering their cities with posters and stickers.

It's a nice in for folks who have never participated in a social movement before, but problematically, it also creates the impression that there's one "real" way to create activism around this issue. There are plenty of other organizations working in that part of the world, on overlapping issues, and they've been shuffled aside because they lack the ability to harness social media in a meaningful way. Combined with the video's slick production values, the action kit feels like Invisible Children is marketing Kony the same way Apple markets iPads.

It reminds me of Kickstarter: donate money to a start-up, and you get something back - usually in the form of a teeshirt or free issue of whatever magazine you're helping to launch, but if you donate more, you can be rewarded with dinners at fancy restaurants, private tours, and all kinds of perks. Both Kony 2012 and Kickstarter have value and mean a lot to the people who participate, but it leaves me feeling like we've become a generation of people who demand a return on our activism investment. We can't just give money to a good cause - we need a button that flaunts our commitment. We need to be seen giving and participating, or it doesn't count.

There's since been a ton of backlash to Kony 2012 and Invisible Children. Other criticisms have erupted - IC has a dubious financial record, these kids were never invisible to their communities, is it noble to spend over a million dollar of an 8-million dollar operating budget on travel, partnering with the Ugandan army to stop Kony has its own human rights questions, so on, into infinity.

I was chatting with my boss the other day, and she said, "Well, isn't doing something better than nothing?" Kony is indisputably a Bad Guy. Ousting shitty people from their positions of power takes resources and money, and spreading the word about that need is part of the process. But do we contribute to organizations who want to make the issues about us and how we feel? Feeling good - proud, even - about the ways we contribute to the world around us is a natural desire, but activism isn't a single-file line-up to the checkout.

No-Big-Deal

Two years ago, I went to the doctor and she stuck her hand into my vagina and frowned. Doctors frowning is a big red flag. We all get up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes, but generally speaking, when a doctor does something like examine a mole, or look at test results, or stick a hand in someone's underpants area and then frown, there's no reason to pop the champagne cork.

My champagne cork? Unpopped.

Two years ago, I went to the doctor and got some shaky news: a lump. My family has a history of shaky news, shared at weird times. My younger sister called me on the phone to say she had The Big C, and my mom has mentioned offhand that she's had a few scares over the past few years, in the same tone of voice that one might say, "I once chugged a litre of carrot juice." I have no real memory of how I told anyone what was up. I turned the doctor's appointment story into an uncomfortable-funny anecdote to tell two drinks over the Good Taste Line at cocktail parties, but in the there-and-now, I don't really know what I said, and to whom, and when. My doctor referred me to a gynaecologist, who was very blase about the whole deal and schedule no-big-deal surgery to remove the lump for six months down the road.

Like with anyone's medical misfortune, there's a cycle to testing and results that has become part of the wilderness of my emotional landscape. Every February (which is, as we all know, the lousiest time of year [except for August heat waves]), I trundle off to the doctor's office and ask that they test me for disease and malformities. It's a nerve-wracking visit in the best of times: in my, uh, sluttier years, I would pray that no unpleasant virus of bacteria was making a waterpark of my lady bits, and now that I'm on the other side of a no-big-deal surgery, it's become a serious question of exactly how viable all my parts remain.

I get an annual ultrasound, because the "no-big-deal" surgery captured one of my ovaries, leaving me with one single worker on the baby-factory floor. If anything should happen to the other one, through trauma or disease, I'll be officially spayed. That leaves the door open for all kinds of things - anxiety every time the mittelschmerz kicks in, worries that I won't be able to have kids, and, if the other one does develop any weirdo tendencies and needs to be removed, the fear that I'll be celebrating my next birthday with a lack-of-estrogen moustache.

The annual test is fairly straightforward. Chug a litre of water an hour before the ultrasound. Sit in the waiting room with my best friend. Every five minutes, complain about needing to pee. Look around at all the old people, and all the pregnant women. Wonder if anyone thinks I'm pregnant. Think about losing five pounds. Realize that, when I pee, I probably will.

Put on the gown, lie on the table, and make insanely fake-sounding chitchat with the Russian technician, who smears ice-cold ultrasound jelly on my stomach and then sadistically presses down on my swollen bladder. Crane my neck and try to see the screen. When I come back from peeing, she's prepping the ultrasound wand, which looks like a sex toy designed by robots, and which will poke me in the cervix and make me bleed. The room is dark. It almost feel like a visit to the spa, except not at all.

Afterwards, my friend and I ate burgers topped with fried eggs and brie, and oatmeal-peach pancakes, and assiduously avoided talking about anything serious. My test results will come back in a week.

Living in the moments between test and result is sort of a dreamy blur. I oscillate between knowing, in my bones, that I have cancer of the everything, and understanding that, in all likelihood, things are probably mostly fine. Statistically, I'm at a higher risk for developing another cyst, which is why ultrasounds are now part of my healthy-living routine. The ultrasound makes me feel both safer and more unhinged about my health. My sister, who now lives cancer-free, has a similar emotional cycle of semi-annual tests and waiting for results. She's learning to ignore the fear in the pit of her stomach. She has more practice.

Last year's test results came back while I was at work. Calling my doctor during business hours had me pale and shaky for hours. I whispered furiously into the phone, desperate to avoid anyone who might overhear my frantic pleading for information. I finally nabbed some nurse practitioner who explained that, while I had developed a fibroid the size of a pea, there were no no-big-deal lumps.

But now? Now I wait.

I hate my body, and because I hate my body, I hate myself.

I've had a long and complicated and, quite frankly, boring relationship with the way I look. It's the same old white-girl middle-class bullshit that all the teen interest magazines warned us about back in 1999, before prescription drugs replaced the hysterical monthly long read on "issues." I first binged and purged when I was 13, I restricted my food intake my last two years of school, I dropped to 108 pounds three years ago and have since rocketed up to 153.

I hate it. I want it to stop. I obviously want to stop gaining weight, but I also just want so badly to stop hating this stupid body. I cried tonight, because my BMI is teetering at 29 - I'm just six pounds away from being obese, a prospect that terrifies me - and I feel like no matter what I do, I just can't win. I can't smoke this away, I can't purge this away, and going to the gym feels humiliating. I feel like a beached whale. My socks make those wrinkled marks around my ankles. I have a double chin all the time.

I hate it so much.

I'm fat. I'm not pudgy or cute or whatever. I'm just fat. I was leafing through a magazine and they had some photospread about pregnancy, and I fit nicely between the second and third trimester. I've got fat-girl arms, and love handles, and my tits are just outrageously big. My body has become this huge other thing, something that feels far away from the way I want to look. It's shocking every time I look in the mirror, because when I was thinner - 108, 122, 132 - I thought I was huge. Now I actually am.

I know, this is so crazy self-indulgent. But understand: all the things I used to do to control this horrible, ill-tempered body have been taken away from me. I mean, I quit them, because they were killing me - good for me! - but the thing that I was so scared of for so long has happened. I just want to hide. I'm so ashamed. I hate this. I'm crying right now.

Wanderbust

When people think of communal living, they think of hippies in the wilderness, spirit walks through ancestral forests, vegans with tofu presses in their bathtubs, pantless children smeared with the juice of wild, hand-picked blackberries, and other faded images from the 1970s. In reality, most of us have live communally: a couple roommates sharing some sugar? Communal living. If you've interviewed more than one person to take the other bedroom in your apartment, you've lived with some degree of intention.

Movies like Wanderlust aren't supposed to be documentaries. Any movie starring Jennifer Aniston doesn't really have all that high a bar, honestly. But can we please move past the idea that intentional living is the sole domain of folks who wear tie-dye and don't think patchouli stinks?

I've lived in three different co-op houses over the past eight years, each with its own unique feel. My first was a real communal house: fifteen people shared one enormous kitchen, stocked each week with shared food, and housemates made an effort to get to know each other. My second co-op house, I lived in a third-floor bachelor with its own enormous deck, my own bathroom, and a kitchen that was just for me. I knew no one else at that address. In my final co-op house, I have my own bedroom, and my kitchen and bathroom is shared with two other girls; it feels like a traditional roommate situation.

What unites each of these experiences is the word "co-op." We have a board of directors, made up of volunteer members, and they set the course for the paid staff who administrate the organization. There are about 250 resident-members who get together for annual general meetings. AGMs govern the general direction of my co-op: the members approve the budget (including, importantly, rent increases), review by-laws, and ask questions of staff and board. It strives to be a transparent process. In reality, it can be unwieldy, bureaucratic, and slow. What happens when 250 people in a room each feel like they can, and should, speak up on an issue? Let's just say it's a good thing Robert's Rules exists.

My co-op comes with a few gold-star amenities, like free laundry, internet services, on-site maintenance workers, and a responsive admin staff. It also comes with a total lack of control over who lives in the room next to yours. I've shared houses with alcoholics, manic depressives who took signing their lease as license to go off their meds, people who smoked pot/cigarettes in the house, and one girl who let her pet rabbit shit all over the kitchen table. I've been woken up by loud fighting, loud puking, loud sobbing, and loud sex. I've lived with jerks. I've also met some of my very best friends in those houses.

Intentional communities try to side-step those issues by using a hybrid approach to living arrangements. One of the biggest benefits of co-op housing can be cheaper rent or amenities - unsurprisingly, those things are attractive to folks on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. But with cheaper rent comes greater responsibility, and intentional communities generally have a process of acceptance or admittance that goes beyond "Can you afford our monthly housing charges?" A particular skill set is valued: are you handy? Can you cook? Crafty (in the maker sense, not the sly-dog sense)? Friendly, but not overly so? Green thumb? Comfortable with worms? Comfortable discussing bodily functions? Direct, but not confrontational? These are all good things when keeping it cheap mean a DIY approach to life. Consensus building and house meetings? Chore wheels? Get stoked, because they're in your future.

Movies like Wanderlust depict those communities as collections of nudists, militant feminists, and a pregnant woman who gives birth under the light of the full moon and carries the placenta around in a hand-thrown bowl. They're caricatures, but comedies are full of caricatures - the dopey pot-smoker, and the wild-eye shaman leader. Compared to George and Linda, the movie's "normal" characters, the batik print is all the wilder.

What's kind of disappointing is that, in this day and age, communal living might fill a real niche for people. To play it off as an all-or-nothing proposition - you have to choose between your teensy Manhattan apartment or not having a door on your bathroom - plays down the importance of community. I hate to sound fuddy-duddy, but when we increasingly socialize online, when we communicate through email and text more than conversation, when we count friends as the number of people on a social networking site and not the number of people we see each week, our capacity to community-build IRL shrinks. The cost of living is going up. People are staying in school longer and emerging with more debt. Living in an urban centre often means giving up green spaces in favour of condo balconies. News media encourages us to avoid talking to our neighbours, taking public transit after hours, and visiting entire neighbourhoods out of a nebulous fear of "danger."

The Occupy movement spoke to people because knowing there were others who shared their concerns had an electric, galvanizing effect. I work in a building that prides itself on it community-building prowess, and they've become a sustainable, expanding business model. More and more of my friends are choosing to live with or near their friends and well-fitting strangers, and they all have locks on their doors and take showers alone. There might be batik in their future, along with close quarters and loud sex. But you have to choose that lifestyle - that's where the "intentional" part comes in - and accept that it will come with some pitfalls. I want the same for myself.

February

I'm craving the new right now. I've had it with winter, even though this winter was a non-event; I'm tired of all the same old food I eat, I wear the same damned outfit every day, I'm even tiring of Coke Zero (gasp! Would that day ever really come?). I want to shake my world up. I keep looking at pictures of Iceland and Patagonia, and wishing I could astral project myself there. I think this is just a result of the late-February blahs.

I adore my friends and I like my job, my boyfriend is terrific and my family is top-drawer. But I'm simultaneously nesting and desperately clawing at the walls to get away. I reorganized my bookshelves the other day, and that made me feel a little more soul-healthy; I think I need that on a cosmic scale.

I do so many things out of habit (like Coke Zero), or out of a sense of obligation to the person I wish I was. I have a stack of clothes that don't fit, that haven't fit in two years and thirty fat and fleshy pounds, and I keep them around on the off-chance that I magically lose all that weight. I have pairs of shoes that have never been worn out of the house, dresses that don't button over my stomach, pants that are too long. It feels like clutter, and I want to throw it all away and start again. Clean white walls, a few carefully chosen outfits, a fridge full of organic produce and nourishing legumes, and a sense of lightness. I feel heavy, bloated with self-loathing for not fitting into my clothes, for neglecting friendships, for working too many hours in a week.

There are so many things I take pleasure in - the heft of a new-old stoneware vase, the sight of my boyfriend's feet dangling off the end of the couch as he watches TV, and a great chunk of chocolate. But I feel restless. I need to work more with my hands, or spend less time in front of a computer. I want my body to feel stronger. I want to eat less, and better. I'm tired of reading tweets: I want to devote myself to a novel, an epic. Something with heft, real intellectual weight.

Not all of this can be chalked up to February.

I feel this way from time to time, usually when I feel especially far away from the person I want to be. I've moved away from things that I used to - knitting, beading, crafting, sitting on boards, thinking about housing, reading novels and short stories for my degree, drinking in bars. Friends have moved away, both geographically and emotionally.

I just want to feel less overwhelmed and more maker-thinker. More like the person I was, the person who used to make things and write things and talk in loud voices and who was skinny and pretty and simultaneously more and less involved. Is that so much to ask?

A Room Of One's Own

I feel like nesting - I've been perusing online shops for stoneware cereal bowls and decent rates on framing, because I'm feeling like all my stuff is going to cave in on me and I'm going to have to dig my way to the surface with a flattened Coke Zero can. I've been wishing especially hard for someone to swoop down and fairy-godmother some gorgeous antiques into my life, and to make sense of the thousands of scraps of paper I have lying around my room. I swear to God, it's a tinderbox in here.

I'm trying to figure out my home decor aesthetic. My mom is an interior designer, so I grew up in these beautifully laid out rooms. They would be washed with colour and texture, and her personal quirks, like hiding the TV in a big cabinet or wallpapering the bathroom with black paper printed with African animals, became normal. I stopped seeing the Japanese garden statuary, and the vintage childrens christening outfits hung on velvet hangers decorating the bathroom became part of the scenery. I don't mean that my mother's style is boring - far from it. She has an amazing ability to see the bones of a thing - a chair, a room, a colour - and tweak into a form more glorious than it could have rightfully dreamed. What I mean is that I sort of take her style for granted, and then I wonder why my own rooms don't look as nice as hers.

Part of it is undeniably a cash flow thing: I don't have hundred of dollars to pour into paint or furniture whenever the mood strikes. Part of it is laziness, because redecorating and renovating is hard work and I am...well, I'm lazy. And a big part of it is a total lack of formal training - growing up in beautiful homes doesn't make me any more adept at creating lovely spaces than any other schmo. But I want to! I'm feeling suddenly interested in antique stores, with their jumbles of globes and vintage magazines. I'm yearning for stoneware cereal bowls and metal egg baskets. I want great big posters of old Japanese films, and 1960s-looking space-age mixing bowls. I grew up reading my mom's design magazines, so I'm not afraid of colour or pattern, but trying to figure out what I want everything to look like is pretty daunting.

My wardrobe is pretty plain: lots of black and grey, some red and white. I play a lot with texture and proportion, and I accessorize with cleavage on the weekends and big scarves at work (yes, I know, I'm about 40 years too young to be dressing like a funky art gallery owner, but here we are). Over the years, though, I've developed a pretty solid sense of what I like. Some harder-edged elements, like a pretty skeleton pendant or subtly gauged earrings, can combine with flowier looks, like floor-length skirts and linen pants. I die for texture - give me a handmade pair of socks, and I am swooning - and I like a little bit of dirt. Do we have smudged eyeliner, rat's-nest hair, and a crooked smile? Then we've got the beginnings of a great look.

But translating that into a design for rooms is tough. There are colour palettes I love, like the brights-on-white of Dia de los Muertos, or the warm nostalgia of buffalo plaid. But do those look good together? No. Maybe I should take a page from my mom's book, who had the African safari wallpaper in the bathroom and a a huge floral motif in the living room. There are things I love wholeheartedly, like hardwood floors, brick walls, and transom windows that I would be lucky to have. There are things like lush plants and great art that I would bring in myself. There are the constant, non-negotiable, room-filling books. And then everything else is just blank.

I feel like a switch has started to turn in my head - for the first time in my entire life, I'm interested in keeping plants alive. I'm making pancakes for Shrove Tuesday. I'm sending letters in the mail. I'm feeling more and more like I'm becoming a person I want to be, rather than just stumbling through life with a collection of goofy, ill-advised accessories and habits. It'd be nice if the rooms I live in felt the same way.

The Ex Files

Breaking up is hard to do, but it's also one of life's inevitabilities. Sometimes, things end in a way that leaves the door open for a friendship, but the road between Break-Up County and Friendshipville is a perilous journey, fraught with hidden emotional booby-traps. It's also a road you have to walk with purpose: it's nearly impossible to just kind of, like, stumble into a friendship with an ex. Deciding to stay friends is an act of bravery, but it's one that attests to the fact that, even though you and your ex are no longer in love, it's still possible to like each other.

Almost everyone, in the early moments of a break-up, says, "But I want to stay friends." The dumper uses that line to assuage guilt, while the dumped considers friendship a useful tool in winning them back. In both cases, the friendship isn't a result of two people genuinely liking each other; there's a hidden emotional subtext that's covered in dirt, bad feelings, and weirdness. "But I want to stay friends" isn't a binding contract. Feelings will change, and a friendship that seemed impossible in the first few days after a break-up will slowly start seeming like it has a chance, and vice versa. If you've said, "But I want to stay friends," you're under no obligation to stick with that.

Also, take some time apart. Some folks set the clock at six months without contact, other say "half the total time you were together." Whatever formula you use, there's no denying the benefits. Refocus on what's important to you - not for the relationship, but your own needs and wants. If, after a few months, you and your ex get together for a coffee, you may decide that pursuing a friendship is a good idea. Awesome! Or you might decide that this person is a human trashpile. Also totally fine! This transition is rarely easy, and putting pressure on yourselves to get over the relationship and into the friendship doesn't help. Being alone helps you ask yourself: how much do I like this person? How much do I like myself when I'm with them?

There are a few different forms a post-relationship friendship can take. You might go through some, or all, of these before you settle. Take your time.

Friends With Benefits: losing your sex life can be one of the most daunting things about breaking up. In an effort to avoid celibacy, some exes never stop having sex. On the outside, this looks an awful lot like dating, but both parties insist that there's no romance - they're just getting their rocks off. Unfortunately, this makes it tough to move on, grieve, or meet new people. Many exes who try this find themselves back together, and because the focus in being Friends With Benefits is willfully not on the emotional connection, the re-couples usually encounter the same issues that forced their first break-up. It's possible to avoid that by talking frankly about boundaries and expectations, but it's also complicated by the emotional hangover of the break-up. Seriously: take some distance.

Neutral: Best described as "friendly, but not friends," this requires almost no work and zero maintenance. These people exchange small talk when they run into each other on the streetcar, wish each other happy birthday on Facebook, and basically have no real communication. There's no ill will, per se; they just don't want to be a part of each other's lives after the break-up. This is pretty easy to accomplish after a short, breezy relationship, and doubly so if you don't run in overlapping social circles (did someone say, "internet dating?).

Hate: In the weeks after my first real heartbreak, I made an effort to spend time with my ex in a misguided attempt to prove that, despite being brutally dumped, I was still awesome. He couldn't care less; he had already started dating someone else. After a few months of misery, I realized that I was angry. Like, really angry, and being around the source of my rage was eating me alive. I cut off the "friendship," because the benefits of staying in touch were not outweighed by the drawback of having to spend time with him. It may take a while for you to realize that, after the relationship ends, you don't actually like your ex all that much - betrayal or infidelity has coloured your perception of them to a degree that you can't pretend to like them. Friendship? Off the table. Don't feel bad about it.

The Faux-riendship: When exes get together, conversation consist of things that don't get said. Fake friendships aren't built on real openness, but a mutual desire to shove things under the rug and pretend everything's fine. If there's a lot of sexual tension, or if one ex brings up "the good old days" a little too often, or if you avoid talking about new partners (theirs or yours), or if you have nothing to talk about but keep hanging out anyway, then the faux-riendship has you in its grasp. It's not a tragedy - with more openness, you can upgrade into an Actual Friendship, and with less, you can slide into Neutral territory - but it's tough to maintain for long.

The Actual Friendship: This is the real winner: when there's no (or few) residual feelings from the relationship, when both people are integrated into the other's post-break-up life, when hanging out isn't fraught with sexual tension or words unsaid. These rare friendships take months or years to develop. There are boundaries - every friendship has areas that just aren't really talked about - but the mutual affection dwells in the present, rather than trying to preserve the past.