May the Odds Be Ever In Your Favor

Katniss Everdeen: “I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence.”

The Hunger Games – 2012

Now this was an unrealistic dystopian movie.

Who can imagine a future where people would actually be comfortable with their children fighting to the death?   Oh wait… That’s right – Viet Nam.  And every other war we have fought… 10-2-1  is a respectable record by a team in just about any sport, right?  But the savagery of having 23 kids die each year for government propaganda purposes as seen in The Hunger Games seems so farfetched as to be impossible.  That is unless you consider that in the said wars, many civilians are killed, and of those civilians, many are children.  Far more than 23.  And as we get older, those that are between the ages of 18-22 seem like kids.  So actually, our world is far worse in this regard, as the body bags from Afghanistan coming into our country alone make the numbers of dead in the Hunger Games … ENVIABLE.  Kids fighting kids for the pleasure of older people is the essence of war.  And all the abstract reasons we offer as to why war is justified (oil, for example), or for containing communism, or to minimize the spread of weapons of mass destruction, etc… well, these are just as silly as the reasons offered by the authorities in The Hunger Games.  Sending our young sons to die for a cause, while exemplified in the Bible and now regarded as a standard practice … shouldn’t we know better by now?  At least we are now getting our daughters closer to combat.  Let’s just see if we are as willing to put them in harm’s way.

Who can imagine a world where your mortal destiny is determined by lottery?  Well, the draft was determined by lottery.  But we don’t have that anymore … though we still have the selective service requirement for 18 year old boys, just in case we need a draft, so lets just say it is not officially off the table.  And the best charter schools, which in many cases are so far superior to neighboring underfunded public schools that to be accepted in them might mean the difference between going to college or not, determine admission by lotteries.  ‘Waiting for Superman’ made the point that the lotteries were almost a life sentence, so profound the difference between the public and charter schools.

How unrealistic is a world where there is a ruling class of people that have money to pamper their pets with expensive food and accoutrements, and adorn their bodies with fashion that are both ultra expensive and a level of  gaudy that can only be achieved through a mutated competition amongst designers, and have the money for expensive plastic surgery, technology, etc., ALL THE WHILE there are people that are struggling to eat, with many starving in large numbers?  Talk about dystopian.  No resemblance to our world, right?   What was great about this movie was, if you hadn’t read the book, you would assume that this future world was only populated by working class folks who struggled sometimes unsuccessfully to put food on the table and had no technology, presumably as a result of the apocolypse.  Only later did we find that while this was a typical pocket of people in ‘District 12’, there existed a  cosmopolitan center that had a bounty of technology, food, and frivolity, only available to the elite of the society.  Perhaps 1 percent of them.  A world where wealth was concentrated in the hands of a very few… who could imagine a place like that?!

Who could imagine a world where people would cheer the very concept of people dying in a reality TV context?  Oh yeah, I suppose there was the republican debate crowds that cheered Rick Perry presiding over a very large number of executions in his state.  Or the same crowd that cheered at the prospect of allowing an uninsured sick person to die.  Or the NFL, NASCAR, and MMA fights, just one step away from the crowds watching the gladiators… Reality TV is anything but real.  And I know from the inside, as I was on the Dating Game, one of the original reality shows.  http://bit.ly/GKWvn3 We looked like we were getting asked questions and were answering on the fly, but we got the questions minutes before the start of the show.  Reality shows are scripted, but succeed by making the audience think that they are not.  Sorry, spoiler alert, I guess.  Entertainment executives know what sells advertising and steer the content accordingly.  Martin Scorsese’s Quiz show was such a great missive about the birth of this phenomena, I couldn’t recommend it more.  We would already have people in stadiums with lions if PETA didn’t think it was cruel for the lions to have such a large dose of cholesterol.

Lastly, how farfetched is a government that manipulates public behavior through fear and intimidation, with a light strategic pinch of hope sprinkled in?  Well, I guess all we would have to do is roll tape on the occupy protests that were confronted by the authorities.  Riot police have every right to stop looting and rioting.  But wasn’t the right to assemble and petition our government sanctioned somewhere?  Like in some document like the Magna Carta or something?  A bill of goods or rights or some such thing?  There seemed to be quite a bit of force being deployed toward those that were not only non violent but … silent.

Our most potent protests today are silent protests, which should be in the playbook of all protesters.  Gathering is good, violence is bad, shouting makes you look sort of like a baby, but silent stares… boy they seem to work.  So gather and stare.  This was powerfully on display in California the day after the UC Davis pepper spraying incident.  The Chancellor of UC Davis after a speech trying to justify the way in which order was kept had to walk through a gauntlet of people … being silent and staring at her.  A similar protest happened to state legislators in Virginia over invasive procedures being forced on pregnant women.   And the Hunger Games captured this form of protest in all its power and glory beautifully.  Great movie, by the way!

If you think, as you watch the Hunger Games, that it seems farfetched, barbarian, and far removed from our world, reconsider.   The reality is our world is replete with even more savagery and oppression than is reflected in this movie.  If you can awaken to THIS reality, you can begin to be the solution.

Tim Handley