For days I’ve been trying to figure out my ranting self in a coherent way about this particular little protest over the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. We ran into the San Francisco version down by the way, while riding our bikes in view of Alcatraz.

As I learned in my employment world, the one where I got the opportunity to actually go to Uganda, actually having attention paid to real issues across the world is important. You know, shit just doesn’t get fixed if no one’s talking about it or noticing. So, for the first couple of minutes, I was not unhappy to see the protest. But then we stuck around a few more minutes.

Within a few minutes, I heard chants about “freeing Uganda” and a row of boys with no shirts and painted letters on their bare chests shuffled themselves into a crooked line of exactly that message — “FREE UGANDA.” Right around then, my disenchantment and usual cynicism entered my consciousness. Not to minimize what the horrible, useless, crazy destruction led by Josephy Kony, in the name of God and the Bible no less, but Uganda IS, in fact, free. A huge chunk of the country goes about their regular, daily lives unaffected by what is happening in the north, while Kony crosses back and forth over the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I will always have trouble getting behind protests that begin with a loose understanding of the underlying facts.

Then, as we stood on the sidewalk leaning on our bikes, a young guy came up to us and asked if we knew anything about what they were doing at the protest and the issues in Uganda. I’m not sure if he was happy in his protesting zeal to have me answer, “well, I was actually in Uganda last year, and I met some mothers of children who had been abducted.” He looked shocked by what I reported they had said happened in the camps, the abuse and violence kids were meant to endure to indoctrinate them into the army. He admitted with a shrug, that he didn’t actually no much about the details other than it was really bad and we really had to help.

I should have shown him the photos I took of the kids’ pictures depicting their ordeals.

My impression from listening and watching was that none of the people there seemed to realize that there’s no war kind of war. Kony is Uganda’s David Koresh, with all of the crazy, an army of guerrillas, a remote, hard to reach border and a the canopy of the rain forest to protect him, and no Janet Reno to burn him to the ground. It’s not warfare, it’s militia crazy with kids as the disposable cannon fodder.

It wasn’t until I read the pamphlet on the “The Rescue” and the “Invisible Children” project that I rolled into full-on rant by the end of the day.

I appreciate political theater but “abduction” in air quotes with a cute plan to have participants simulate what it’s like to be kidnapped and wait to be rescued is too precious. It trivializes bloody violence in a way that I’m afraid the U.S. absolutely rocks. Why study the actual situation and understand the details and get the names of the players, when you can just throw a hefty chunk of rhetoric at the problem? It’s much much easier to keep it loose and dramatic.

Not to mention the completely pussified pamphlet I was handed where participants in the overnight pajama party, where they would feel how the children who were abducted felt, were assured special volunteers in blue T-shirts would be there to help if they got overwhelmed by the experience. Because yeah, sleeping on the ground at night is scary and totally comparable to a 10 year old with an AK-47 being forced to kill his parents or rape his school mate.

The briefest of brief paragraphs gave slight background. In calling for solidarity with Uganda and its government, you’d think maybe they could actually throw in some stuff about that government. Maybe something about President Museveni and what he has said (he favors hunting him down, but the locals believe in a forgiveness ceremony). Or the fact that there are reports that the U.S.-backing of ragtag Congolese and South Sudanese soldiers against him last December not only failed, but pushed him over the border into the Congo where he’s been hunkered down and pissed off and killing like the madman he is? Where’s all that?

Their ultimate call for U.S. involvement is just too stupidly shallow to consider. If their assessment of what should be done, all triggered by U.S.-government actions and more aid resulting from celebrity-backed attention, were a freshman paper on foreign relations, it would earn an “F” for having no basic understanding of how this stuff works.

I felt cruel explaining to the fresh-scrubbed college boy who engaged me that more, better aid wasn’t really relevant in a country that gets piles of dollars already. It’s a tad, shall we say, way, way, way the fuck more complex to have effective aid and strategic foreign policy. (Cruel because I fully believe he was there at the protest to be among friends and maybe get a chance to show some aid and comfort to a sensitive, female, fellow combatant later that same evening.

I think this blog posting and the collection of information at the end grabs and channels some of my anger. We in the U.S. are protesting years too late without any root understanding. Jesus, sometimes it’s no wonder to me that the rest of the world hates us. We’re like the kid in class who tries real hard but ain’t never going to understand hard stuff, like algebra, and dodge ball is more fun anyway.

Technorati Tags: Lord’s Resistance Army, San_Francisco, protest, Uganda