Posts tagged hank green

Just realized that next weekend I can accomplish my goal of having a John Green book signed by Hank Green and a Hank Green album signed by John Green.

Just have to buy one of Hank’s albums first. 

Okay so I want to post about my thoughts on the whole Kony thing and why, while I care about what an awful guy Joseph Kony is, I’m not doing anything about it, and especially not supporting KONY 2012 (which I’ll admit I don’t fully understand).

So when I first started seeing this KONY 2012 stuff yesterday it made me really uncomfortable and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I almost made this post yesterday after reading Hank’s thoughts (and to a lesser extent John’s response) on the matter, because they articulated some of the things that I hadn’t been able to articulate about why it made me uncomfortable, such as the fact that the internet grabs onto things and they’re a thing for like a day and then they’re gone, and the fact that people were posting about it really obnoxiously in places it didn’t belong, like the comments of John’s video about Syria. Also sometime yesterday I started seeing posts about how Invisible Children, even if their ultimate goals are good, is not necessarily a good organization, which I think is one of the other things that initially made me kind of viscerally uncomfortable… people just jump on stuff without knowing anything about it.

So this morning I woke up and the first thing I saw was this post, which sort of brought all those disparate things I’d been thinking about yesterday together into one post and it clicked in my brain. Aside from the questionable stuff with Invisible Children, I’m not worrying as much as I probably should about the whole Joseph Kony issue because I don’t have time to. That may sound horrible, but there is only so much time to worry about important issues, and while all the rest of you are spending all of your caring-about-things energy on Joseph Kony, other causes are being neglected.

I’m not saying I don’t care, obviously. I think the LRA is horrible and awful and child slavery is horrible and awful and any man who is responsible for any of it is horrible and awful, but there are lots of other horrible, awful things in the world: what about all the child slaves who are picking the chocolate you eat,* what about all of the young LGBT kids who are dying because they feel so alone and hated, what about the people and animals that lose their homes when somebody wants to cut down the rainforest to build a factory?

There’s only so much worrying a person can reasonably do. And I think the root of my point is that I don’t think people should choose their own personal most important causes based on which causes are popular on the internet right now.**

*this one has been on my mind lately because of the HPA and also because it was something we talked about a ton when we went to Ghana, and it’s a cause I’m actively working on supporting, by trying (and often failing, but it’s a start), to not eat chocolate that isn’t fair trade. It’s also got me thinking about other fair trade and trying to drink fair trade tea.

**This actually makes me think about how the P4A was run this year. I don’t have some big problem with it; I think it was awesome and I’m very glad we raised so much money and awareness. But I am now wondering if it makes the most sense to donate to the most popular charities, when those are no doubt the charities that are also getting a huge influx of money from P4Aers donating directly. I wonder what other way we could do it though… maybe a lottery system with some of the charities that got a lot of votes but not the most votes? Discuss.

You would think that a song with only ten words and three chords would be easy to learn.

Mostly for P4A, and itemized chronologically:

• $5 to Rheagen’s Journey
• $10 to the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck to get the numbers up so John would lick his dog, Willy
• $10.17 to Amazon for my dad’s Christmas present (this is the only one that’s not at least tangentially related to P4A)
• $5 to Kids In Need of Desks
• $10.49 to make a Kiva loan
• $55 to buy a Kiva card for a friend for Christmas
• $35.50 to DFTBA Records - $10 for John’s new Zombie short story (which goes to the FDWS), $5 for an Esther bracelet, which goes to This Star Won’t Go Out, and $18 for one of Maureen Johnson’s YA Saves shirts, which goes to Reading is Fundamental… plus shipping
• $10 more for the FDWS to get the numbers up so Hank would kiss The Katherine on the livestream
• $8 to the Treasure Coast Wildlife Center
• $0.89 for Alex Day’s Forever Yours, all the proceeds of which go to World Vision
• $10 for the Wayne Foundation
• $6.33 for seven more versions of Forever Yours when I found out that they were on Amazon Mp3 Downloads
• $10 more to the FDWS to get the numbers up so Hank would post that awesome picture that he posted on tumblr, which spawned so much good interneting, as you can see

Total spent on p4a: $166.21, plus a lot of time comment spamming. It was my first ever p4a and it was pretty incredible. Very inspiring, certainly, and I feel very good about spending so much money on so many different good causes.