The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Read Free

Games Companion, then I suspect you feel the same way.

    2800 BC , Assyria
    This may be one of the earliest examples of prophets foretelling the end of the world due to moral decay. An Assyrian clay tablet from approximately 2800 BC bore the doomsday prophecy that “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. bribery and corruption are common.”

 

     
    W hen thinking of The Hunger Games trilogy, core issues immediately pop to mind. The reader can’t help but wonder if our society is heading toward the same problems depicted in the world of The Hunger Games. Perhaps this is a central reason why the series affects readers so much: We identify with the central characters and can actually envision—with great horror—a future reality that is not too different from Katniss’s reality. We’re already heading down the path leading to these aspects of society we see in the novels:
      
Big Brother
  
Government control over citizens, harassment of citizens
  
Lack of privacy and erosion of civil liberties
  
Legal penalties for invoking freedom of speech
  
Using people to spy on each other
  
Dehumanization
  
Ultimately, rebellion.
     
    In subsequent chapters, we establish that there’s a huge disparity between the people in the Capitol who have too much to eat, who focus on what they look like, and spend money on plastic surgeries and style, versus everyone else—the starving, the hounded, the impoverished, those lacking even basic human comforts. The “haves” versus the “have nots”—we see them clearly in the world of The Hunger Games, but we also see them clearly in our society.
    In our real world, in the United States, the top 1 percent of all households controls 43 percent of the wealth, and the next 19 percent controls 50 percent of the wealth; hence, it’s estimated that 20 percent of all households in the United States control 93 percent of the wealth .
    What does this leave for everyone else, the 80 percent of citizens of the United States? Unfortunately, 880 percent of households have only 7 percent of the nation’s financial wealth. And even worse, as Professor G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz tells us, “[T]he bottom forty percent of the population . . . holds just 0.3% of the wealth in the United States.” 1 These are enormous disparities in resource distribution between the rich and everyone else.
    Business Insider puts it bluntly: “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age. If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand.” 2 Statistics show that the disparities are starting to look like what we saw right before the Great Depression. For example, in 1928 the “top one-hundredth of 1 percent of U.S. families averaged 892 times more income than families in the bottom 90 percent,” and in 2006, “the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 times more income than America’s bottom 90 percent.” 3
    People have lost their homes at a shocking pace, and some reports suggest that the “housing crisis could peak in 2011, as the number of homeowners receiving foreclosure notices climbs to about 20%.” 4 Indeed, as of February 2011, CNN tells us that foreclosures are responsible for a whopping 26 percent of current house sales. Further, “nearly thirty percent of mortgage borrowers are underwater on their loans, owing more than their homes are worth” 5 and estimates place the losses to banks on mortgages at possibly more than $700 billion. 6 People are unemployed with no hope of ever finding jobs again. The understated statistics from the government suggest that the nation’s unemployment rate is 9 to 9.5 percent as of January 2011. However, as many analysts are quick to point out, the unemployment numbers do not include those who have given up all hope of finding work. Estimates place the hopelessly