An

Appeal for Discernment With the lights out, it's less dangerous Here we are now, entertain us I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now, entertain us. ~Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit Recently a new movie has come out, The Hunger Games, based on a best-selling series by Suzanne Collins. Teen drama has taken a disturbingly shallow turn of late (Twilight), and this series of books helps to elevate the genre to a new level. Or it should. I began to ask people why they enjoyed The Hunger Games so much. Many talked about the effective character development, the powerful themes of hope and courage, and the joy of victory over the Capitol, the domineering evil empire of The Hunger Games. And I got

scared. Terrified, actually. No one understands the point of the book, the essential theme of the novel! The Capitol is evil, yes, not for their malicious intent but for their ignorance and blind subservience to a social trend. Consider Katnisss question here: What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? ...What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment? (Collins 65). Sound familiar? It is because the Capitol is America. Our society has forgotten how to analyze the world, creating generations of people who only know what they are told. Truth hides in plain sight. I fear because we have closed our eyes, and anything can happen in the

 dark. The Hunger Games illustrates a society in which entertainment has become a need

that defines and destroys the culture. Instead of exposing this problem in our own society, The Hunger Games masks it, encouraging the evil it pretends to fight. The Hunger Games portrays a society without choices. So why do we choose it willingly? Most see the Districts as the area of no escape. The residents are faced daily with starvation and poverty with no end in sight. Children are subjected to annual battles to the death. Hope has lost all its feathers. But they choose to survive. Those in the Capitol live very differently than those in the Districts. They have everything they could ever want: unlimited food, easy jobs, and cushy lives. But they choose nothing. Katniss provides for her family, defies the Capitol, wins the Hunger Games, and goes on to save the whole country. Those in the Capitol paint their faces and gossip. Their lives are empty of all autonomy, for they have surrendered choice in order to flow with the tide of the norm. Even worse, they pretend to live a life of freedom. They conceal their slavery to the culture by naming it entertainment. To surrender self-authorship in order to follow the trend is the most ludicrous act of bad faith I can imagine. They choose to relinquish choice! Its funny that we think we are so different. Nearly 500 million people across the globe have seen The Hunger Games. Nearly 500 million people supported Katniss through her journeys and tribulations, and nearly 500 million people returned to their beds that night with a smile at the thought of seeing another good movie. That is modern culture. We see, we laugh, we cry, we forget, we repeat. Its an endless wash cycle. Sure, we smell nice and clean, but the colors have faded to banal thread. How can so many love an existence of absolute insignificance? The problem is that we allow emotions produced in movies and other visual stimuli to replace the emotions we should feel in everyday life. Society no

 longer needs imagination; entertainment imagines for us. The easiest example of this is seen in the modern toy industry. Toys used to consist of action figures that barely moved,

Barbies to put in dream houses, cowboys, Indians, and all the other wonderful plastic joys. Today children can no longer be entertained by such simple plastic. There must be lights, and sounds, and pictures; visual and auditory stimuli have supplemented imagination. The arts are failing in public schools; is it a surprise? The desire to create will soon fade. For now, we live in an age in which technology has flourished from the diligent efforts of many creative minds; however, if the minds of this generation are surrendering their inventiveness, what will there be to offer the next generation? I suppose at this point the reader has begun to question if modern culture is really so bad, if our trends really follow such destructive paths as the Capitol. For easy examples, look to television. There is a show that pits individuals against each other on a remote island in which only one survives. In fact season 24 of Survivor is going on right now. Another popular example is American Idol. Viewers watch and vote for their favorite singers as the show progresses through a variety of elimination rounds. These are obviously a far cry from sending children into battle, but the crucial part is the motivation. We find equal entertainment in them both. What is so enjoyable about shows like Survivor and American Idol? Its not for the joyous celebrations at the end. Its for the conflict, the sorrow, and the pain. Reality television suggests that we like to see others suffer. On American Idol, the only rounds I ever enjoyed watching were the first few My favorite part was seeing the awful singers who were given air time purely on the basis of their dreadfulness. I know many, if not most, people felt the same. Survivor has to keep coming up with new ideas for bigger, more exciting, seasons; we need new conflict, or we get

bored. But why? Suffering should terrify, not excite. To understand human love of suffering, it is important to understand why we love violence, the most enjoyable form of pain. A recent study at Vanderbilt University shows that acts of aggression trigger positive reinforcement from dopamine centers in the brain. Head researcher, Craig Kennedy, says, we learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it (May and Kennedy 185-196). From television, to movies, to video games, to language itself, violent media pervades our culture. The goal of nearly every top-selling video game is to kill, often as bloodily as possible. This intake of violent media can increase aggressive behavior and desensitize the viewers. Even worse, studies show that the habitual consumption of violent media will negatively affect a child into adulthood, even if the consumption ceases (Anderson et al., 104). The point is that violence is popular; to inflict suffering on another is one of humanitys favorite pass times. This means that even if the effects of violent media are only small to moderate, they occur on such a large scale that the effects are compounded and passed to each subsequent generation. Humans enjoy the aggression that violence promotes. As long as this desire for seeing conflict remains in our minds, escalation is always a possibility, a probability. Entertainment threatens our morality more than anything else. In The Hunger Games, the children are the driving force of the empathetic connection readers feel with the story, and the horror of the Hunger Games is made real by inflicting it upon innocents. If burly men were sent to the games, it would be understandable and even able to be rationalized, but the pain of children invokes immediate outrage. So why do we impose the same horror on ours? We claim to value our

future and to foster a desire to protect them from the evils of the world. Yet we classify The Hunger Games as a teen novel and give it free reign in the minds of youth. The average teen that speaks of Twilight and Jersey Shore cannot comprehend the depth of the world portrayed in the novel. Thus, all that is seen is the surface, a battle between the good guys and the bad guys with a happy ending. I believe Collins created an extraordinarily potent book with the power to penetrate the minds of the careful reader. My fear is that careful reading is an antiquity. One study shows that Americans are reading less and their comprehension skills are disappearing. Almost half of all Americans ages 18-24 do not read books for pleasure, and the number of seventeen-year-olds that do not read for fun has doubled over a twenty-year period. Only about one third of high school seniors can read proficiently. Only one in three college seniors reads for pleasure. Additionally, even if they are reading, nearly sixty percent of teens are using other media while they read. As reading decreases, so too does the intelligence of the population. The study shows that the reading proficiency rates of adults are remaining stagnant or declining for both genders at all education levels. Even among college graduates, reading proficiency has dropped over twenty percent. Proficient readers get better scores, higher paying jobs, and are more likely to visit museums, create art, play sports or do outdoor activities. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to be unemployed, and only three percent of prisoners read at a proficient level. (To Read or Not to Read 7-20). Media entertainment is replacing books, and our society is suffering. Discernment is no longer a virtue but a vice. To look too hard and to think too deeply have become social stigmas. We are raising a generation of ignorance.

 Facebook provides an illustration of our societys obliviousness. The site gives immediate access to the social life of any person that comes to mind. The site allows a

person to thus remake his or her character online. If he wants to portray himself as a strong Christian or a computer whiz or a movie buff, all it takes is a few clicks and keystrokes to completely alter his perceived reality. Self-authorship is taken to the extreme, and essence is allowed perfect freedom. One of the more disturbing trends of late is to post a picture of a starving child with the caption, Like this picture if you hate world hunger!, or perhaps an image of Jesus with the caption, Like this picture if Jesus is awesome! These images generate hundreds of thousands of likes. It is as if people feel that click of agreement is a real step towards ending world hunger. They can log out with a feeling of success, of satisfaction. Youths take up causes to be activists, but without actively helping anyone. They join sports to be athletes, not to play the game. They go to school to be students, not to learn. High school is the breeding ground of such thought. To be cool, to be liked, and to be admired are not the yields of those who are real but instead of those who can pretend most effectively. Interestingly, a recent study has found that the amount of time spent on Facebook is directly correlated to a persons dissatisfaction with his or her own life. By spending so much time online, they began to interpret the perfect profiles of their friends as their actual attributes. Thus they viewed others lives as more significant than their own (Chou and Edge 1). Every user seeks happiness from perfect self-authorship, yet faces continuous depression from the perfect self-authorship of everyone else. Bad faith is the norm, and it is rewarded. Instead of serving as guiding lights in their childrens lives, parents are encouraged to allow their children complete freedom to be whatever they want to be, or whatever they pretend to be. The essence of this generation is defined by authors

 who never learned to write. Thus a child becomes a product of a cultural trend. As our culture begins a downward spiral, must our children follow? One of the greatest examples of our downfall is seen in the current value of life in America. When we hear of deaths from the War on Terror, it means nothing to us; these are abstract numbers that represent anonymous people. We rationalize death into information that we throw away whenever possible. For instance, imagine hearing of a group of soldiers killing over 300 people in a far off country. But hold on--this was in the middle of a war. The soldiers had the right to use lethal force; it is unpleasant but a necessary means to an end. But the victims were not enemy soldiers; they were women,

children, infants, and elderly citizens murdered in the village of My Lai in Vietnam. Oh, and the soldiers were American (Murder). Still, we rationalize the results: That was a problem of the Vietnam War, a brutal, and horrid affair. Lets just forget the whole thing. Those 300 dead mean nothing compared to the threat of a failing grade on the next test. Yet if someone killed your mother, you would not hesitate to kill him or her at a moments notice. Look at the Hunger Games: 24 children have been sent over seventy-four times to die in an arena in order to dissuade the thought of rebellion. The average reader of the series has no real thought of the hundreds of children who died before, only that what they are doing to Katniss is monstrous. That is the root of the problem; readers dont want the system to lose; they just want Katniss to win. Americans arent any different than those in the Capitol. Were both cheering; were both participants in the Hunger Games. In the end, Im left with an overwhelming feeling of terror and emptiness, for I know these words rebound hollowly. As I was voicing these opinions to a friend, she seemed startled before replying, Oh, Id never thought of it like that! Thats neat. The Hunger

 Games and ideas of a similar vein cannot simply be nice little stories. We must analyze the

world around us. Otherwise we run blindly in the dark. Eventually we will slam into a wall. The most distressing thing is not the darkness, but our voluntary desire for it. There is no government, conspiracy, or evil empire that ties us down. We retie the blindfold willingly each day. Humans have an alarming propensity to ignore something if it brings pain to consider the truth. As long as it is easier to enjoy entertainment than comprehend it, humans will rejoice in their blindness. I do not fear violence, or evil, or suffering, but I am horrified by ignorance, for it will inevitably bring them all. This isnt about a paper or a theme or a grade; this is a cry into the darkness. I pray that a few still remember how to hear. Before forgetting this paper as a neat little idea, please listen else we forget meaning altogether.

 Works Cited Anderson, Craig, Leonard Berkowitz, Edward Donnerstein, L. Rowell Huesmann, James Johnson, Daniel Linz, Neil Malamuth, and Ellen Wartella. "The Influence of Media

Violence on Youth." Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 4.3 (2003): 81-110. Chou, Hui-Tzu, and Nicholas Edge. "They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives." Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 15.2 (2012): 117-21. Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. May, Michael, and Craig Kennedy. "Aggression As Positive Reinforcement in Mice Under Various Ratio- And Time-Based Reinforcement Intervals." Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. 91.2 (2009): 185-96. "Murder in the Name of War My Lai." BBC News. British Broadcasting Corporation, 20 July 1998. Web. 12 April 2012. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/64344.stm>. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. Washington D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007.