Social activism

About 4 or 5 years ago, a few students asked me if I wanted to be the Amnesty International advisor at school. being that I had no idea what AI stood for (belief wise) I said I would think about it. In the meantime they gave me a dvd called Invisible Children which I LOVED because it moved me. It's about the child soldier situation in Uganda. I said yes to the club and we showed the video to all of our students and asked if they wanted to help the situation. We quickly became the largest club for two years in school with 120 members. We wrote letters to free unfairly jailed prisoners around the world among other things.


Anyways, recently there has been this video floating around facebook as an update to Invisible Children and I've gotten a bunch of emails from past and present students about it as well as kids stopping in to talk about it. 


This morning I got a kudos kard from a fellow colleague about how well informed my students are about the situation since I do talk about it a lot while doing the effects of imperialism.

This is another reason I teach :) They remember it and act on it. It touched them. 

I know a lot of people are complaining that people who don't normally care are all of a sudden jumping on the band wagon of caring but here's what I say: good. Jump on the band wagon! Welcome :) Even if you forget about this in a couple of days. For a couple of days you cared about someone other than yourself.  

I get it. Some people don't like band wagon fans. But this is not about being a pink hat fan of a sports team. This involves life or death for many children so that you can have phones, laptops, diamonds and even chocolate for a lower price. These kids are not kidnapped for no reason. It's so they can be slaves to be brainwashed to mine those products for you. And you don't even know it. And once you know it, you likely won't care.

It's not a liberal vs. conservative thing. This affects you almost every single second of your day especially if you a technology loving person. This does involve you and you should get involved or stop buying products made with slave labor.  Or at the very least don't complain about people caring about something even if it is for a day or two.