Adventures in RCIA - The Catholic Church Calender: Easter Time

In the Catholic Church, there is Easter Sunday and then there is Easter Time. It lasts for 50 days after Easter Sunday. It ends with Pentecost.

There are a great deal of flowers, like on Easter Sunday and the pulling-out-all-stops decor of Easter Sunday stay until Pentecost. There is a special dismissal chant for Easter and Pentecost.

The scripture readings in the Mass, (which are also at least some of the texts for the homilies Acts of the apostles, Revelation, and the Gospel accounts of Jesus time on earth after the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost.

The book of Revelation is interpreted very differently in the Catholic church than in Protestant churches. They do not teach that it foretells the end of the world. There is nothing frightening in it for them, for the Catholic church, Revelation is a book full of hope and there is nothing fearful in it. I have more study to do on it. I very much look forward to learning more about that, and then sharing what I learn.

Solemnities of the Octave of Easter - Every day for 8 days after Easter.

Special days in Easter Time include include:
Divine Mercy Sunday - The 2nd Sunday after Easter. It was Pope John Paul II's "special task," as he put it. St Faustina had some revelations during the time of Hitler's reign in Germany. It gave tremendous hope to the Polish Catholics who suffered in the concentration camps, one of whom later became a bishop and began the process that led to St. Faustina being made a Saint. The revelations of Divine Mercy are summed up in the statement that "Good triumphs over evil, life is stronger than death and God's love is more powerful than sin." This is revealed in Christ's cross, but St. Faustina''s very timely spiritual experience explained this in a way that made it very accessible to the understanding at a time when it was so urgently needed. It is also a message of the need for us all to forgive. During the Cold War, when John Paul II instituted this Special Day, and now when we hear of wars and rumors of wars everywhere, the Catholic church believes it is very important that those who follow Christ remember these revelations and ponder them. I agree. I really look forward eagerly to celebrating my first Divine Mercy Sunday and hearing/reading more teaching about it. I expect that it might need its own post!
The Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist. - April 25th
Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord - 40 days after Easter
Solemnity of the Feast of St. Matthais the Apostle - May 14th
Solemnity of Pentecost Sunday - 50 Days after Easter.

I see I will need to do more study of the book of Revelation, Divine Mercy Sunday, and the Octave of Easter. Those look like some pretty special and important subjects. Having been raised Pentecostal, and knowing that my pastor was raised Pentecostal, I wonder what kind of sermon I will hear on Pentecost.

If any of you see a special day or some other topic you would like me to investigate or inquire about, leave it in the comments below and I will see what I can do.

Take care and God bless.

~Mother Star

NEVER! GIVE! UP! - Appreciating the Power of the Little Things

Today the lesson is on how little things can make a big impact.

I found a plan for how to get through the semester with all my present income cut off.

I do not like having all my income being from some government program. Getting off of that would involve possibly having to go over a month with nothing coming in at all, not even the unemployment insurance and food stamps.
There are pretty healthy recipes I know that cost so little that I could afford to get through most if not all of the semester eating them. The ingredients last long enough, and are healthy enough, to do that, though they can be somewhat bland and I will need to take a vitamin supplement. I bought 15 bags of brown rice yesterday, thats one of the ingredients.
My LINK card, which is what the foodstamps are loaded on in IL, is missing. It may have fallen from my backpack or pocket when I was running errands yesterday.
No one can use it without the PIN number, but I can't get groceries without it.
If it does not turn up before tomorrow morning, my plan to go sign up for school at the last minute could potentially be foiled. I will have to go to the DHS office tomorrow, if I am well enough as I am now feeling ill, and see if I can get it replaced in the morning. Whether that can be done that quickly or not will effect how soon, and thus whether, I can register for school at RCC. A little piece of plastic, just a few square inches of plastic. Because of that, the direction of my life could be altered.

The alternative/backup plan is to start the online program through Ashworth college as soon as can get car back to running. Got a starter for it, and a new positive battery cable. just gotta put it back together, and wait for the next (last?) unemployment check to get insurance back on it. That will not help me put the investment class I already bought and read the material for to use though, as my car will still be ugly and loud and ruin my credibility...

The thing with the investments is you have to get an option to buy the property, the kind where you can back out of but the seller cannot. Then you have to find a buyer within the option period, and when/if you do, you buy and sell them at the same closing. Your buyer pays closing costs, and of course they are paying more than you are, so you have a profit. Options tend to cost around $100. In order for people to accept your offer (most won't anyway as it'll be low, but you don't know who will until you try and there are people out there who will) they must believe you can actually buy their house though - which you actually need not be able to do, you just need to secure the option and find someone else to buy it. If you drive up in a noisy, smoking, rusty, heavily dented car like mine, NO ONE will believe you can buy their $100,000+ house! Forget it. Ditto with not having a car at all. That's my problem in that area now.

Going back to school this spring could, in addition to job skills, get me access to resources to get a car with. Being cut off for what little income I have because of returning to school would justify maxing out student loans if I have to, and having a decent truck would enable me to do the investment stuff AND scrap metal. It will also go a long way to help in the traditional job search. So while I am waiting for the right house deal, I can still make money to pay the loans down.That is, even though no payments will be due til I am out of school for six months. There's no sense letting it grow unchecked if I don't have to...

If that plan gets shot down, then I will have to persevere as I have been, and try to fix the car up on my unemployment while looking for a job in a job market where you basically have to have a car or else... In which case it will just take a lot longer to get the same things done, and I will have to persevere for longer. How much longer, I don't exactly know for sure. I have seen a few more "Now hiring" signs lately, so things are picking up...

In the next few days, it will all get ironed out, and the decisions will be made.

I met the deadline for that anthology submission, and I did some writing for clients since I got laid off, so to say I was self-employed as a freelance writer is not a lie, at all. I was doing a lot of writing. I had a big project I got done and will hear feedback on sometime in the next week or so, about getting published or not. That stuff all resolves the "gap in employment" issue, I think/hope. Returning to school works pretty good as a reason to stop that "job."
I cut my hair today, since the shagginess and dead ends probably made me look less "together," even though I tried to make it look real nice. I will have to ask my roommates' mom to help me even it out. Then I will be more marketable for both employers and as an investor. It does not look much better now, except the dead ends are snipped off...

Little things make a huge difference, A little bitty piece of plastic, a snap on a pocket or a small pocket zipper coming open, which possibly letting the plastic fall out. Split ends in one's hair. Things that can alter the course of your life in this modern world, because they can deny you access to what you need in the times when you need it, or create an impression of you other than what people want to see.

Life sucks right now, but it could really be SOOO much worse, I really cannot complain. I have internet access and am sitting here blogging to the world about what I am dealing with.
I started this series with the certainty that in the end, it would encourage someone, because they would see what I come up against and yet, I WILL win! I still believe that, and I will never give up.
Neither should you.

Godspeed.

~Mother Star

Lessons From the Hunger Games - Part 5

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.

I have said how the world of The Hunger Games resembles our world in how media redirects our attention from serious issues onto non-issues, hoe many of the effects are harmful, and how we need to genuinely stand up to the system and attack the problems at the root. In The Hunger Games the people of Panem need to recognize that the violence they and their countrymen, their children, are subjected to is senseless. 

That is often true in our lives today. Every day in America, young people die in gang violence. Every day in America and around the world, people consume media glamorizing this real-life bloodbath and get the same things out of it that Panem got from watching the Hunger Games: sense of identity, and excitement. Like The Hunger Games' characters, real people relish the "action," while refusing to face the hideous reality affecting people in our cities or at least our states. We focus on non-issues, like how this media puts minorities in the limelight, how they "represent" their socioeconomic class or their "race." Likewise, The Hunger Games' media personalities went on about how Peeta and Katniss raised their hands together "I am proud I come from District 12," putting a little band-aid on the compound fracture of District 12's problems. Some of those problems were right in front of them, in the form of two young people who were not really there by choice. The celebrity commentators made lots of emotional appeals that shifted focus and ignored the real issues. They went on and on about superficial things like clothes and mannerisms. They made very significant mountains out of some psychological molehills in order to justify celebrating such extreme tragedy - tragedy that can be equaled, if not exceeded, by the realities in some of our own communities.

The Lesson: Like the Capitol of Panem in The Hunger Games, middle-class Americans and Europeans get most of the resources the rest of the world breaks their back to produce, and enjoys the services of those who must slave at three jobs to make ends meet. There are numerous inequalities built into the system we have in our real world, too. Violence will not solve the problem. Being amused by a problem does not solve it, either. There are things that can be done, things that must be done. Step one is calling reality exactly what it is. Media that presents these problems in a way that does not inspire people to take serious action is probably not "calling attention" to it effectively.

Some info on what's really driving there unpleasant realities: I grew up in a minority neighborhood, a black neighborhood, though I am white. People finished school there without learning how to read. Teachers did not really teach them and did not really grade their work. I was homeschooled and learned to read "The Cat Sat on a Mat" the first day. One of my childhood friends who was a year older than me, Latoya, did not believe that I could read. I read her a story from my reader. She asked to borrow it, went into my house and asked my mom to teach her to read. There were, and I think are, laws on the books that might have gotten my mom in a lot of trouble if she had done so, so she refused. I have no idea if, or how well, Latoya ever learned because we moved away.
I had heat in my house during winter, usually. During middle school, some of my friends wore their heavy winter coats to some of the their classes at school because the heat did not work on the second floor. The teacher had a small heater under her desk that helped keep her warm but the students shivered while they tried to learn. THAT will bring your grades down very quickly! It went on like that for years.
Many students in poor and/or minority dominant schools, receive even decades-old, outdated textbooks that are basically destroyed. When I was in college, I attended a meeting with local organizations, high school students, and members of the local NAACP chapter. The problems in my old neighborhood are common across the nation, and are getting worse. There was no heat in Eisenhower High School (in Decatur, IL) at that time. I do not know if the heat was ever fixed, but I do know they now have to strip down and surrender their coats, sweaters, and jackets when they arrive at school so that they cannot hide drugs or weapons in them. They get their coats back at the end of the day. There were flat screen TVs (a luxury at the time) on the walls in every hallway but they were never turned on or used for education. The books they used remained tattered and outdated. The building has been renovated,and is almost made of windows now. If the pattern I have heard of in other cities persists here, they still will not have new books and the higher heat bills will be an excuse for even less effective education. A friend in social work found out at a conference the same thing was happening in our state's capitol.
In all of these communities, drugs and gangs are a serious problem. A SERIOUS problem. I said, a serious PROBLEM, not a serious charade or show. The forces driving these problem are largely in the majority's control. People can and should hold school boards accountable. People can and must and demand transparency about whether books in poorer school districts are up to date, whether the buildings have climate control, and etc. Few, if any, ever do. People in power are not inclined to pay attention to letters written in Ebonics or street slang, and that is how a lot of people, from my old neighborhood at least, would write. People with good enough education to be taken seriously need to write the letters and they don't. Often they have no idea what is going on, and rely on an entertainment oriented news media to tell them.
People showed up at the local community college needing remedials for material that should have been taught them in Kindergarten; this includes both math and English. I heard an English tutor say he was helping someone with a paper that said, "Ain't nobody gonna PMD" which, he was told meant "put me down." The student actually planned to hand that in to a (remedial) English teacher in their freshman year of college. Seriously. Imagine trying to get a job as a secretary with math and language skills like that. Imagine trying to write a resume with that education level. Forget it. 
The kids know that they do not have decent books and adequate facilities that other schools do have, and they deduce that no one believes in them. People of every race and class need to stand up and fight for them, and make education truly equal and right. Unlike people in The Hunger Games it will not cost you floggings, executions and war to make the needed changes. It only costs the time to write a strong letter to your local elected officials. It will probably save you a lot in taxes later too, honestly.

Many middle class whites from the U.S. and Europe plug in every day, getting their adrenaline fix off of glamorization of real people's real problems. Media commentators glorify how those "artists" are so rebellious and courageous, and how the violence and misogyny and references to drugs are understandable because of where they come from. "They are black people in the media representing their community. Don't expect them to act responsibly." Thus, "gangsta" media puts minorities in the limelight much like black-face did in the 1930's. Do the middle class knuckleheads who carry on about how those "artists" are "telling it like it is" ever do anything to change "how it is"? No. If ghettos ceased to exist, if people of every race and class got the same opportunities, if organized crime disappeared tomorrow, where would they get their entertainment? Who would smuggle in their drugs? Who would they pretend to be a part of, rather than facing their own "boring," relatively privileged lives? Do those who allegedly "call attention to" these issues explain why minority-dominant schools score so poorly and their students do not get jobs? Do they tell what specifically can be done about it? No. They exploit these problems, and the broken emotions of their genuinely poor-minority fans, for personal wealth. That is not admirable.

The Lesson: What is going on in your city, your country, and your world that you need to stop getting entertained by and start standing up to? Are you willing to raise the three-fingered sign, like Katniss and District 11 did, and start the revolution? If you had to bring the news to one of those boys' mothers that her son has become a statistic, or had to watch her get the news like District 11 watched Katniss weep over Rue, I bet you would be ready to stop enjoying and consuming, and start acting and resolving. Immediately.

Godspeed.
~ M.S.

NEVER! GIVE! UP!: Drive, Drive, Drive, Drive, Drive

You gotta know what you want before you can know how to succeed at it.
I know what I want and my dreams are as big as my obstacles have ever been, much bigger than they are now.

I have been writing, writing, writing. I have also done a lot of studying. There is lots to learn. Always lots to learn. There  will never come a time when that is not the case. No matter how much learning one has done, there is always so much to learn.

The landlord has offered to sell us the house on CFD. We would just pay the same amount we pay for rent,just like normal, until it is paid off. At this rent rate,that would be just under three years. My roommate doesn't want it,but I do. I do not want to take on that kind of responsibility in this situation though, so I have to wait.

I am still planning to study graphic art, but am no longer sure which institution to study through. I am considering the local community college here, just because it will be a lot more stuff, including some multimedia and 3D animation classes, plus hand-drawing which I want to get back into. It also offers an internship,which I could put on a resume and would go a ways toward building the all-important portfolio. The online one is cheaper though, is all online, and self-paced so it would not put any constraints on my time or miles on my car. Decisions decisions. Registration for the local school,which I already have a A.A. degree from and do not much care for, does not open until  late march or early April. Registration for the online one is always open. At least I am not under pressure to make a decision immediately.

I am getting through a MOOC creative writing class, little by little, as I can. It is going pretty well, I think. I am getting more serious than ever about my blog - well,there are two blogs actually. This one and one I only poston once or twice a week. I have done some research on SEO (search engine optimization) and learned some new techniques to try.

I also recently ordered a course for real estate investment. It checks out with the BBB and has pretty positive ratings and checks everywhere I have looked. So, I took the plunge a couple days ago and ordered it. I have been reading the e-book and am on page 16 or so out of 119. I hope to start seriously putting it to use in early January, maybe just a bit later.

I find myself pretty much where I most did not want to be. Living in Decatur in Winter without a job. However, I am holding my own for the most part, and am putting this time and disappointment to good use to make what REALLY want a reality. Decatur,IL does not have a lot of job prospects,especially in winter. The place that laid me off was in Champaign. The main reason I wanted to return to this region - not to this town, but oh well - was to be nearer to people that are far better family to me than my biological family. I had to escape my biological family, but I just had the best Thanksgiving Day I have ever had, despite my living in Decatur.

I am anxious to see some of this hard work pay off monetarily, but I know that is not going to happen in two weeks or anything like that. It takes months to get projects like these off the ground - especially for ones where the full course for how to do it has not even arrived in the mail yet!
In the mean time, I have gotten a couple of really short temp jobs lined up for December, a somewhat regular client expects to have more writing for me to do next month ("freelance" is usually never steady), and have unemployment coming in every couple of weeks (I do report anything I make to them, of course, and recommend doing so to anyone in that situation). Progress is actually moving at a pretty good clip, perhaps that is the reason why it often still feels like it is standing still....

Until next time, don't you ever give up on your dreams. And I will not do so either. :)

Godspeed.

More on How to Save the World

Continuing the vein of using real estate investment to turn communities, neighborhoods and spaces around, it is time to consider some of the social aspects.
In America, classes have been segregated from each other. There are poor communities and wealthy ones. There is truth to the statement that when generations of people do not find work, they come to see the welfare state as a means of living. Sadly, when people do not have to invest anything in what they have, they often fail to appreciate it. This, in America at least, leads to destructive levels of neglect that lower property values and people's self-worth and helps produce things like ghettos.

Students in Florida who receive scholarships to attend private schools often report that being surrounded by the middle class, where work and college is just expected and value routinely been placed on education, changed their thinking and helped redirect their lives. An environment where poverty is expected and hope is limited or non-existent plays a big role in numerous social problems.

We need to mix up the pot. Raising rent to levels only the middle class can afford in school districts that are beyond undesirable in not a solution, it is financial suicide. So how so might we shuffle the deck?

Using my own city as an example, let me paint a picture of my proposal.
Decatur, IL is one of the most declined economies in the USA. In 2013, only Detroit was going down worse. The homeless population is high, as is vacant housing. It has been this way for a long time. Decatur is home to Archer-Daniels Midland's headquarters, a Caterpillar plant, two heavy polluters similar to ADM, and a very good private University. The Decatur Public schools are barely worthy of being called schools. There are two private high school options and three private elementary school options.

The adjacent towns of Forsyth and Mount Zion are predominantly white and middle class. Their schools are very good, as U.S. public schools go, and they serve several small farming communities nearby as well as Decatur's elite classes residing on the outskirts of town. So there are good schools around, if you live in the right place.

Thanks to House Hunters for this photo

Starting as near to Milikin U. as possible but in the low income neighborhoods, begin a project that will have a food forest and renewables. Plant the trees and start making the food forest as soon as possession of the house is secured. If possible, so a quicker flip of another property to make a lot of money faster, and start adding the renewables a.s.a.p. Advertise with the campus rooms in a community house that has renewables on low utility bills. When the fruit and nut trees are producing, start mentioning that in the ads. Pay the house off, or perhaps refinance for lower payments, as soon as possible in order to offer students discounted rates over summer if they will help with the garden. When more than one property is secured, estimate the man-hours required and try to meet it by helping impressionable young tenants get through school - and give them some permaculture school in the process. This creates a captive audience of sorts, for permaculture classes. After the houses have generated enough income to pay for the improvements - especially the renewables - and the projects are complete (both, which may not happen at the same time) it is time to think about selling.

Thanks to permaculture for this cool photo

Wait until someone who likes the house and understands/appreciates the permaculture finds a good-paying job locally. Offer the house to them a little below market value, or right at it if you expect housing values to go up, on a rent-to own basis. Draw up paperwork that locks in that price. Half the rent every month goes into the price while you retain landlord status and fix things and help solve garden problems if they should arise. They will still be responsible for damages caused by neglect or abuse. After a certain number of years (perhaps 3-5?), according to your contract, the buyer needs to pay the balance. This will give them time to reduce student loan debt and get in a position to take on a mortgage. The renewables and the food forest will help facilitate that, especially since they will be allowed to sell surplus production of the garden.

 These just-starting outs will not likely need to send children to school before they get into a position to be able to send they kids to the private schools, and avoid the appalling district 61 public schools. They will be incentivized to stay because of the food forest and the renewables and the affordability of the house. Their good job will allow them to handle the real estate taxes. Your continuing to reproduce this pattern nearby will create a mixed-income neighborhood, with college students, career people, Young middle class families and people who have been on assistance for generations. The higher property values will feed real estate taxes into the local schools, hopefully helping solve the problem. The relationship with the tenants could create opportunity to tell them about the issues with the local schools so they will be a.) aware they should not send their kids there when they have them and b.) hopefully inspire them to hold the local authorities accountable.



On the other side of the coin, getting the low-income children OUT of district 61's mess and into a place where they are actually educated and prepared for life will take a different approach. Use section 8 to do this. In this area, section 8 does pay enough to cover the more expensive houses, because Decatur is zoned with a larger town that has higher housing costs than any of the neighboring towns. It is more likely to require some quick flips with very few changes made in order to jump start or speed up the project. Houses in low-income areas of Decatur are very cheap. Houses in Mount Zion or Forsyth, or areas of Dectur zoned for Mount Zion or Argenta-Maroa schools are NOT.

Thanks to House Hunters for this photo

During the summer, if you have students staying over summer, they can help work on putting in the food forest in order to cover the part of their rent. If you are certified to teach permaculture, they can put in extra time and get extra education there for free if they want the extra education; it would then be a work-study situation or an apprenticeship or something. This could alo open doors for people who just wantto study permaculture, they can work their fees off helping to change the town.

Thanks to Pushing through the Pavement: A Permaculture Action Tour for this photo

Again, start the food forest as soon as possible. Addrenewables as soon as possible. Pay attention to the Section 8 Guidelines. Baby-proof the place or design it with infants, pre-schoolers, and elementary school children in mind. Ideally, the house will have a space that can be turned into a bedroom, easily so that if another kid comes into the picture, the family is ready. If you can find one the housing authority will approve, put in a swingset. You want people incentivized to stay where their kids get better education and ther are more jobs available when the kids become teens.
You might have to make a summerstudent-house out of this for a few years. If they have a job they do not want to give up (in Decatur area, jobs are precious! You might not be able to get another one when you come back in the fall), being able to stay in the area over summer will help a lot. (The rent goes back up to full price forthat vicinity as of September 1st. That will almost certianly get the students planning to move out by the time school begins.) Obviously, you need to have flipped another house to about pay this one off in order to afford going with no tenants or discounted tenants until the food forest is ready!

Thanks to Permaculture for this photo


After the food forest is ready, and the students are back in school, get it section 8 approved if you haven't already. Advertise through the the foodbank, and local homeless or battered-woman shelters, not craigslist or the newspaper. This one is not likely to be sold for a long time.
If a tenenat family becomes upwardly mobile to the point where they no longer qualify for section 8, you can, at your discretion, work something outwith them to rent to own the place, like in the case above. You might also accept work for part of the rent, in which case you can teach permatulcure to more people. Be creative. They might not, or probably won't though, if nothing else because minimum wage went up and low-skill jobs can be expected to be scarcer. Sadly...

The end result of these practices is facilitating change through permaculture education and utilization, and by improving opportunity for education.

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.