Negative Thoughts

I generally have faith in the ultimate resolution of mysteries. What we don't know we someday will, I always feel. It may take so much time that we ourselves will never know, but surely those who succeed us will know, or those who succeed them will. That's not entirely satisfying I admit, but I take some comfort in knowing that eventually answers come and, in the event of injustice, justice comes in some form or another.

There are many famous mysteries that endure presently, some of them being injustices at the same time. They never found DB Cooper, the famed airline hijacker. They never ever figured out who poisoned the Tylenols- an evil act responsible for today's tamper-proof containers. That's a frightening thing when you figure that the responsible party could easily still be out there and probably is no better balanced mentally today than they were then.

I was today thinking about Joseph Kony. He's a warlord in Uganda, and if you know his name it's because a video enumerating his atrocities circulated online last year. The internet-savvy became inflamed with a sense of justice and vowed to bring social networking's power to bear in an effort to catch and punish the man. I was myself skeptical of the campaign's likely efficacy, though naturally I'm as pleased as anyone when a vile person like Kony gets what he has coming.

Of course, the attention span of those fervent crusaders ran out, aided probably by some rather odd behavior by the guy who'd gotten the whole thing going. Today Kony remains at large, and is once again as obscure as he was before he was briefly made famous. A recent article notes that he is funding his activities by killing elephants for their ivory, but you wouldn't know that had you not taken the initiative to find out what Kony's up to.

I am, therefore, invariably very doubtful about any do-gooding mission that I hear of. Is that mere skepticism, or does it go as far as cynism? I like to think that I'm not a cynic, because to me that's a considerably more negative quality than if I'm merely skeptical. I never doubted the campaign's value, but I could have been persuaded of its success if only people had stuck to it. They sure didn't, did they? Did they even intend to? It was called "Kony 2012" the whole time, like it was either going to be solve right away or not at all.