The Pecan Park Eagle

Suzanne Collins: hungry enough to write what came to her while TV channel surfing.

Empty = Deprivation + Death-Measured Recreation = Hunger Games.

Back in the first decade of the 21st century, aspiring American writer Suzanne Collins was channel surfing the TV cable menu one night when she noticed that segments of a reality show featuring competition began to blur with pictures of our invasion of Iraq. This imagery mix quickly morphed into her writing canal for a trilogy of books that started with The Hunger Games, published in 2008 and now in theaters as a 2012 first movie of three (so far) planned in this trilogy storybook franchise.

Hey! Even Harry Potter started small!

In the Hunger Games, all that remains of post apocalyptic USA is a North American nation called Panem, a place where ambition, drive, culture, and productivity pretty much have gone to seed in spite of the flourishing plant life observable in the lush and green hills and valleys of the movie’s real life North Carolina back drop setting.

Panem is ruled by dictatorial, sadistic leaders who are now well into the 75th year of their annual “Hunger Games” celebration. In the Hunger Games, each of Panem’s 12 districts is required to provide two adolescents, one male and one female, and each between the ages of 12 and 18, to compete in a battle to the death in the forest near the capital, but under close scrutiny from high-tech television coverage.

What’s the point? And why do they even bother honoring one winner each year? The Hunger Games are ostensibly designed to help take people’s minds off their general misery. One winner is allowed because, well, as the leadership figures, “the people need to hope for something.” If not for that hunger for hope, the games may as well be about killing them all and celebrating the absolute presence of desolation and despair.

Panem is no paradise. We get it.

What we don’t get (what I don’t get) is how anyone could find anything substantial to like in this story’s plot or progression from the original premise that these fictional futuristic world games were supposed to instill hope – regardless of how this first of the three planned movies ends. I won’t spoil the end of the opening franchise movie for those of you planning to see it – but  I do choose to clarify that I only saw The Hunger Games on a date night trip with my wife. I never read the book, but reviews confirm that the movie is true to the book’s plotline.

Maybe the real “hunger games” are the ones we now play with out children’s future. Our kids and the next dozen generations aren’t going to have a chance to pay off the debt we have been piling up for them, yet we continue to do it, rather than take some kind a stand. We also keep telling our kids that they need a college education, but we’ve made it so expensive that most can hardly afford to set foot on a college campus without taking on a huge lifetime of personal debt with them, even if they actually do graduate. We raise them in activities that award trophies for everyone who shows up breathing. Then we send them out into a world where getting a job is now a problem even for those who have earned the opportunity by their educational qualifications.

Then there’s the worst “hunger game” of them all. We send our brave young men and women out to do the noblest of service to country as warriors for America. And then we leave them on foreign soil with no clear plan for victory or coming home alive again.

Maybe I’m getting too old to remember what that deeper hunger is all about, but I don’t think so. Real spiritual hunger emanates from the soul of our beings, as far as I’m concerned. Call it what you will, based upon your own beliefs, but reach deeper for it than the plot line of this new hot book/movie – and certainly dig deeper than the forces that control our political and economic decisions and defer them onto the backs of those generations that will follow us.

Hunger games? – We “ain’t” seen nothing yet.