Why care about any place that isn't America?

While telling my students about the Invisible Children sometimes I get comments like, "there are people who need help in America why are we helping Africans"? I get it. We do have a lot of issues in America but I don't think that means that we can't help people who need help. I don't mean through wars,  by the way. Those are a waste of time, money, energy and lives.

Sometimes I think about the concept of borders - they're fictional lines that can not be seen anywhere but on a map. And those fictional lines determine your language and culture. But millions of years ago the planet probably looked similar to this:

We were all part of one giant country at some point. Would that make us all one country? Probably not considering every continents can't keep it all together. But we make up these laws and rules that if you pop out of your mom between one place's fictional borders that you are automatically that country's nationality. Congratulations - you win the jackpot... or in some cases, not. We all had an equal chance to be born in the USA, Canada, Iraq or Uganda. It's not your doing that you were born here. And if you were born somewhere else and being ritually abused with an ineffective government, wouldn't you want help? And wouldn't it piss you off if people said, "that's Africa, it's not my problem". I get it. It's not our problem. But I just don't believe that it should work like that.

If you want to argue that adults should be able to take care of their own problems - fine. The Joesph Kony thing involves innocent kids who do not know any better and don't know how to chance things or get help. There are too many problems in the world to fix all of them like little girls being killed en masse in China or the mistreatment of women in the middle east. You gotta pick something to care about. The foreign aid budget is only 1% of our budget. 

I am not saying we should get in everybody's business but some guy kidnapping and thousands of kids maybe needs to be dealt with. And my personal experience with people who say the above things is that they're just talking... and very rarely do anything to help anyone be it in America or elsewhere.