What baffles me about the popularity of The Hunger Games is how many people are opposed to young people reading it. Now, I must point out that every one that I have personally spoken with who has voiced opposition to it has not read it. One lady was going on and on about how bad it was for her grandson to read it. I asked her, “So you didn’t like it?” “Oh, I haven’t read it,” she said without a thought. I knew that already because I know that this lady, who is a teacher, doesn’t read books. She only watches reality TV.
It reminds me of a friend, who is also a teacher. A parent voiced her opposition to her teenage child reading To Kill a Mockingbird because it uses the word “nigger” and talks about rape. My friend asked the lady if she had read it and the lady admitted that she had not. Now, before I move on, I should say that I don’t know this lady and I don’t know where or if she went to school but if she went through school and was never required to read To Kill a Mockingbird, then that school needs to be punished. And that lady needs to be locked in a room and forced to read it. And any teenager needs to know that we live in a world where people say “nigger” and girls get raped.
Now, The Hunger Games is no To Kill a Mockingbird. But it is compelling reading for teens and adults. And I think it has value.
The biggest opposition I hear about The Hunger Games is that “sending children out to kill each other until only one is left standing” should not be looked upon as sport. That’s true. It shouldn’t. And I think that that is the point.
I think the crux of The Hunger Games series may have been spoken by the character, Plutarch, near the end of Mockingjay, the last book, “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.” You don’t have to look far back into our long history on earth, only the past hundred years to see how bent on self-destruction we are and how quickly we forget it.
And that is why I think teens need to read this series. And then they need to move on from there to reading the history of the last 100 years (and of course, back to the beginning of time). As I write this, children are forced to murder in Africa. Not for sport? For what other reason? It is sport for sadists like Joseph Kony. But it is nothing new. I read in a history of the Holocaust how as the Nazis were cleaning out one of the large ghettos in Poland. A 14 year-old boy in a Nazi uniform was allowed to spear babies on his bayonet as they were tossed from hospital windows. The story went that he was having quite a fun time of it until he realized how messy it was and that’s what made him stop. It wasn’t the murder and suffering that made him stop it seems, but he didn’t like getting his uniform messy.
It’s a bad world we live in. Do we want our children to read nothing more unpleasant than Little House on the Prairie where evil Nellie Oleson is as bad as it gets? We live in a world where children are enslaved and forced to kill. We live in a world where there is starvation. We live in a world where many children, like the children in The Hunger Games have very few choices. And perhaps that is our problem in the West. We have so many choices that we forget how few choices some in our world have. To them the best we in the West often have to say is, “May the odds be ever in your favor,” perhaps a new way of saying, “Be warm and well fed.”
I’m often tempted to look at the world with complete cynicism and fear. But it was the evil President Snow who said what is true in The Hunger Games movie (I can’t remember if he said it in the book): “Hope, it is the only thing that is stronger than fear.” Snow misjudged how true that really is and it was his downfall.
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity.”
