HCC Student Planning "Blanket the Night" Kony Action

It was difficult not to hear the name Joseph Kony last week. The Ugandan rebel leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army was the subject of a viral video that has garnered over 70 million views on YouTube.

What critics say is his notorious past of abducting children—conscripting young boys and forcing girls into sexual slavery—was carefully packaged into a 30-minute documentary by the nonprofit Invisible Children and shared worldwide through social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Near the end of the video, the organizers ask viewers to participate in a planned action called “Blanket the Night” to hang up posters around their cities and towns on April 20.

“This is the day when we will meet at sundown and blanket every street in every city till the sun comes up,” says the narrator of the video around 26:30. “We will be smart and we will be thorough. The rest of the world will go to bed Friday night and wake up to hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice on every corner.”

In Columbia, Nathan Warfel, a Howard County Community College student, was inspired to organize a “Blanket the Night” event in Columbia. He said he started a Facebook Group to enlist others and that more than 600 people joined in two days.

“We think probably about 20 percent of the people will show up,” said Werfel, who said he was taking into account the unpredictable nature of Facebook-organized events.

Warfel, 18 and a resident of Ellicott City, said he learned about Kony through a church-based community, before the video went viral. He purchased 125 posters from Invisible Children’s website. He said he’s not sure yet where to hang the posters but is considering Columbia mall, Maple Lawn, HCC and Old Ellicott City.

Howard County police said they had not been contacted by organizers of the action but said they wouldn’t arrest people putting up posters, according to Sherry Llewellyn, a police spokesperson.

She said it “would be nice” if the organizers agreed to take down all the posters after a set time. Warfel wrote in an email that he wasn't planning on taking the posters down.

The Kony 2012 video has been controversial. Critics of the charity said the video oversimplified Joseph Kony, whose power and forces have declined significantly over the past 10 years, and the conflicts in Uganda.

Also, scrutiny of Invisible Children’s finances reportedly showed that most of the group's fundraising budget was spent on travel and the video, rather than directly helping people in Uganda.

Despite the criticism of the group, there appears to be near unanimous agreement on Kony’s atrocities.

“Kony is the closest thing the world has to an honest-to-God, beyond-the-pale serial killer with an army of followers,” wrote John Lee Anderson in the New Yorker, “and he has been on the run, and on the rampage, these past 20 years, without ever being the object of a concerted international effort to catch him.”

The stated goal of the video is to raise enough awareness of Kony to lead to his capture and put him on trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

“It might be 'slacktivism,'” said Warfel, about the act of sharing the video versus funneling money directly to Uganda, “but just putting the posters up [in a month] shows that we still do care.”

He called Invisible Children “geniuses” for the simplicity of the video, its ability to be shared and how it powerfully communicated a goal and idea. Still, Warfel said he worries that in a month the buzz will have worn off and people won’t care anymore.

“It’s a long time for anybody, especially in this world,” Warfel said. “In a month they’ll be on to the next thing. I don’t even know if my heart will be there in a month.”