Every night these children night commute to a safe camp away from their homes.  They do this so that they will be safe and will not be abducted by the LRA.  These children have to race the setting sun and the rising moon to get to these camps before nightfall so that they will be safe inside the high fences.  They all sleep together on blankets on the ground, they do not have the luxury of their own beds in their own rooms.  In the morning they walk the many miles back to their home to proceed with their day, and come evening they repeat the cycle by walking back to the camps.

I look around at my room and I wonder why and how this could be possible.  How could these children have to run away from their homes every night just to stay alive, while I just have to walk upstairs to my room and know that I am safe.  In a world like our own today, this should not be happening.  We all need to act upon this, and NOW. 

You may think that there is nothing that you can do, but there is so much that you can do.  I used to think that somebody else would deal with this, that I’m just a kid and the adults will handle it.  Well, these invisible children in Uganda are kids, too!  They are my age and they have one of the hardest lives imaginable.

The organization Invisible Children was created by three best friends after they took a trip to Uganda and saw the horrible conditions that A LOT of people are living in.  Their main goal right now is the We Want Obama Petition.  Our goal is to get this bill to President Barrack Obama’s eyes by November 18th.  We want him and congress to act upon this bill and announce their plan to stop Joseph Kony by this Christmas.  There are already 96,875 names signed on the petition and 151 members of congress on board.  Don’t you want to be a part of something this big, this powerful, this amazing?

I don’t care if you do not like President Obama, this is not really about him.  This is about saving the children of Uganda who are being killed, abducted, forced to kill, forced to hide, forced to live in fear every second of their lives.  So, put away your negative thoughts, and put down your name to save the Invisible Children of Uganda.  They don’t have a voice, so we have to speak for them, and make THEIR voices HEARD!

Now, if you don’t know what to do, but you want to do something (which you should, it is your responsibility to do something!), here’s what you do, RIGHT NOW:

1. Go to invisiblechildren.com
2. Sign the We Want Obama Petition, don’t put it off!  We want President Obama to see this by November 18!
3. Look and see if your representatives are on board with the bill, if they aren’t contact them in some way to tell them that they SHOULD BE!
4. Look around the website and see how else you can get involved!  They have really awesome videos and contests, and other great ways to get you, your community, or your school involved!

We’re supposed to learn from adults, right?  Well, if you ask me, I do not think that the adults in this world are teaching us kids the right lessons.  We have celebrities, who show that you can make millions without doing anything even though that is utterly impossible.  Then there are politicians, all they seem to do is fight and insult each other instead of ignoring their differences and making the world a better  place.  You have wealthy, upper class people who think that since they have money they can treat everybody who doesn’t with disrespect.  These are only a few of the examples of the lessons that kids are learning from the world around us and there are many more, but from the start they don’t seem like good lessons, do they?

People in this world today do not treat each other with respect.  Whether it be for their political views, their financial status, their race, their heritage, or their religion.  For whatever reason people think it is okay to treat each other badly because they are different from what they see as “normal”. 

There are people who go out of their way to show as many people as they can how much they dislike a person.  I have to ask why they’re doing this when they can be spending their time making something they really care about happen and making the world a better place instead of putting more hate into the world.  Why should you care that a person views something differently than you do, why should you let that ruin your life?  The fact that people have different views and ideas is what makes the world a better place!  If everybody had the same lives and the same ideas what kind of life and world would that be?

Our world these days is captivated by the lives of celebrities.  Everybody thinks their lives are so amazing and they revere them but what most people overlook is that they are just regular people.  Some of them are just lucky that they were born into the right family while others are loved because of their scandals and the drama that they bring to the silver screen.  There are some that are very talented and do not have much drama in their life, but a lot of times they are overlooked.  Celebrities show kids that they can have “glamorous” lives without having to go to college or having to work much even though this will most likely not happen.  Why is it that celebrities are paid millions (as in 25 million) of dollars a movie while teachers and police are not paid even close to a million dollars a year?  Why are the celebrities revered while nobody likes the teachers?  The teachers, who mold the kids’ minds and personalities, and the police and firefighters, who protect us all from the danger in the world, are paid next to nothing while the celebrities, who party and go to rehab, are paid millions?

I have never been one to be interested in politics.  I never liked the fighting and the trashing of the politicians during their campaigns.  But, I go to a very political school so this past year I did pay a little extra attention to the presidential race.  While it was fun to hear the speeches that were given by many people, watch the states turn blue on election night, and to scream at the top of my lungs when President Barack Obama was elected at midnight I still don’t like politics much.  Politicians seem to like to point out their opponents faults in commercials and during debates.  What I would much rather hear is what you are going to do to make the world a better place and let me make my own decisions about the other person’s ideas.

There are people in this world that do become very succesful during their life and have a lot of money.  It doesn’t really matter how they got it, sometimes they earn it with hard work or they are born into a family of money.  A lot of times they come to the conclusion that since they have money they can treat everybody around them however they want.  The people who work for them, such as cleaning people, landscapers, cooks, etc, seem to be “lower” than them so they think that they do not have to treat them like real people.  In a coffee shop or restaurant I’ll see some wealthy woman disrespect the person working there and HELPING them and it fills me with so much anger because that person works so much harder that the woman yet she thinks that she is better than them.  Well, just to let any of those women know, they are about 100 million times BETTER than YOU.

So, these are the lessons that you adults are teaching us.  You teach us that we don’t have to work to make a lot of money, we should insult those with different views to get ahead, and we should disrespect those who are “beneath” us.

Well, I’ve got a lesson for all of you.  Why don’t you look at your children, or a child you know, and see how THEY view the world.  They go to school and they become friends with everybody because they have fun together.  They do not care how much money you have, who your parents are, what religion you practice, what race you are, they just want to play with you because you have fun together and they don’t care if your “different”.

So, yes, I know I’m still a kid but am I the one who has the lesson to learn, or are you?