Lessons from The Hunger Games - Part 2

If somebody put real Hunger Games on tv or a webcast, would you watch it? Would you feed the monster and help it grow?

Suzanne Collins put, in my opinion, an allegory to our time in a book and on a screen. Ironically, it may only be lost in the mix of media messages for most people.I offer some thoughts on how the world of The Hunger Games is really parallel to our own. There are a lot of questions here to ask yourself, I am not really looking for people to give me their answers, some of these are quite personal. Just answer them to your God and yourself.


As, promised, we continue the topic of what serious and life-altering lessons we can learn from Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. One challenging thing we find is their world differs from ours only in the extreme, and in some of the details. The basic problems are the often same.

How many Haymitches do we have? We no longer have a draft, but veterans from the drafts are still with us today. We have many warriors walking wounded, trying to drown their misery in substances. What did Katniss want to do after she won? To forget. Many veterans want to forget. While we honor our veterans for their service, many of us and many of them do not believe the missions our rulers send them on are necessarily in our best interests. The only thing in the world more painful than losing people you love to violence -or really any other tragedy - is to believe that there was no pupose in the tragedy, or that the purpose was worth less than it cost.
There were even people in Panem who sent their kids to special schools to make them bloodthirsty killers, brainwashed them to "bring pride to our district." Perhaps it was to avoid the pain of losing two kids every year, for no reason. Perhaps they got caught up in the lie that it was about pride, and that the kids were there to show that they really were better than the other districts. Hide from the fact that you have no power against this injustice by actively choosing what you have no choice but to choose. Make yourself feel empowered that way, raise your kids to have no respect for human life so they will have a better chance of winning. Give your community an ego-boost about something that is really quite shameful. Don't stand up to the system that makes you economically better off than most. Take your losses in your morals, not your sense of security. In this film, it backfires and none of those kids return home.




The people of Panem in The Hunger Games need to face the pain of losing their children for no reason, especially in Districts 1 and 2. They need to face reality, and call it by its true, ugly name. Turning an oppressive system meant to put you under the oppressors shoe into a source of pride and identity, and raising your kids to "win" these atrocious "games" to "bring pride to the district" is to try to get rid of the pain caused by a problem without addressing its cause. The games were there to make sure they knew their "place," by taking their children away to fight and die for no reason. The idea was to make it clear there was nothing they could do about it, to let them know who was "really in charge". They "empowered" themselves and prided themselves on "thriving" in that system, training their kids think that it elevated their district if they killed all the other kids every year. They perceived this as empowerment and pride because they accepted the lies and ideology of the corrupt system that instituted the Hunger Games in the first place.

The Lesson: Not everything that makes you feel better is healthy or helpful or good.  There are many applications for this. Calling yourself by racial or gender slurs could resemble this, because that is also surrendering while priding yourself on how well you are fighting. I see this everywhere. Women calling themselves b****es, black people calling each other n****s, and saying it means something they must know - at least deep sown inside - that it does not. Hide from the pain and call oneself courageous for doing so. Ease the misery at the cost of perpetuating the problem.

I see this frequently in the feminist movement. To some people, any time a woman does something conforming to male gender roles, it is seen as liberating. Self-identified (though not necessarily qualifying for the label) "feminists" do not consider whether the things being imitated are negative, or even oppressive and unproductive to men as well as to women. Taking on males' shackles is not going to free us, it only adds additional or different chains.

In the same vein, an abused woman who prostitutes herself to try and turn an abusive system into cash and calls herself "empowered" is lying to herself. She is never treated with any respect, so she declares war on the idea of respect and spurns her humanity by volunteering to be an object rather than declaring was on the objectification of women and confronting the source of the problem. She is not empowered, she is too weak, or weakened, to even face reality. Not a good candidate for a "Mockingjay" for herself or anyone else. She is not elevating or empowering herself or anyone. These decisions are founded on conformity to the mindset of the perpetrators who think they exert power over others by sleeping with them, it's built on never solving the problem.

Calling yourself a b**** and acting like a stereotypical, pig-headed male by pushing your way to the top and not caring about anyone else, or being rude,or being odious and vulgar, or making hateful words into "good words" and reversing hateful imagery is very unhelpful and hypocritical. The key to destroying oppressive systems is not to imitate anything said or done by the oppressor. Do not allow people that hate you to name you, keep their hateful words out of your vocabulary - all of them. Keep their actions not worthy of being called human, and that make the world an unhappy place, out of your behaviour. Women who prostitute other human beings,women who emotionally manipulate men, women who are physically and verbally violent, are not "empowered." They do no more to elevate womanhood than the tributes of Districts 1 and 2 in The Hunger Games elevated their districts.

Godspeed.

~ M.S.