As someone who has read The Hunger Games trilogy, what lessons you can take from it?
Mockingjay deals with rebellion of the Districts toward the Capitol.
What lessons can we apply to current world affairs?
Thank you.
@curiousnonny
Ooff this is gonna get really long cause I already wanted to talk about it. But I hope people will read it, nonetheless.
So, I grew up in a country that has been under a dictatorship my whole life, and when I read THG for the first time, it was my first year having immigrated from my country. I mention this because THG deals with a corrupt government as its main villain, and I think for a lot of (young) westerners this was maybe their first time encountering such a thing, but I already knew how insidious world leaders could be. And how blind people could be to it. And I also knew how the people would always resist and take care of each other. And the books made me even more empathetic to others and uncompromising in my morals.
At the time of me reading, however, I did still think that this was a hyperbole of the real world to fit fiction and drive home the point. I thought “there’s no way people would actually celebrate murder and turn a blind eye to oppression like that when it’s being shown to them live, no matter what propaganda they’ve been fed.” I also thought, “there are more people in the districts suffering than there are in power, they could easily take them down. Or run away, there’s no way they could keep so many people locked in the districts.” As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize I was wrong.
Right now, Palestine is on its latest fight for life and freedom, and since the genocide happening to their people and on their land is being broadcasted to the world, as we see their oppressors admit to wiping them out with no remorse, you’d think everyone would be on their side, without question. And yet.
In THG books we saw homes, hospitals, schools, bakeries, and people and entire families being bombed from existence and we mourned them; we write thousands of words of analysis on these things, and we write stories were it never happened, and people get to heal. And yet when it happens in real life, when real homes, hospitals, schools, bakeries, and people and entire lineages are bombed from existence, so many people stay silent. Because this we can’t romanticize.
Maybe if the Palestinians had some teenage star-crossed lovers living in Gaza, more people would care and call for a ceasefire.
I think the main lesson we can learn from these books is that we should stand with oppressed people, and fight for their liberation, even if we think it doesn’t concern us. We should learn to question our leaders and make sure that we keep them in check as much as we can. We should learn to identify and refute propaganda. And we should learn that war and oppression is not just a cool backdrop for a fictional love story; it’s something that happens to real people. And if there were to be a book written about our world today, we shouldn’t be ok with being one of the complicit bystanders; or worse, the people condoning and enabling the villains.
And we should learn that there is always hope. And when people try to silence us and erase us from history and people's minds, we will always fight back and we will always rebuild.
Thank you for this question @curiousnonny
