Channeling Our Fascination with 'Hunger Games' Into Real Rampant Economic and Soccial Inequality

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http://www.alternet.org/activism/channeling-our-national-fascination-hunger-games-americas-real-rampant-economic-and-social


Last week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and a dozen other labor leaders shared selfies showing themselves giving a three-finger salute. If you’re asking yourself what a three-finger salute is, you probably weren’t one of the millions of people who packed theaters this weekend to see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The film, based on the second book of the best-selling series of the same name, is set in a society of rampant economic and social inequality. In the story, the Hunger Games is a glamorous televised gladiator-type competition in which poor children become celebrities fighting to the death. The hero is Katniss Everdeen, a Hunger Games winner who inspires the resistance. The three-finger salute is how the people show support for Katniss, an outsider like them, and for the cause.

Trumka shared the selfie as part of a campaign created by Andrew Slack, a Nathan Cummings Foundation fellow. The campaign, Odds In Our Favor,includes a website where fans of the book and film, who are mostly teens and tweens, can raise awareness about the dangers of the systemic inequality we face here and now.

Slack is launching the Imagine Better Network through his fellowship. The Network will build on the work he and his colleagues are doing at the Harry Potter Alliance, organizing a huge community of fan activists to create change in the real world. In an L.A. Times op-ed, he wrote that “fantasy does not provide us with an escape from reality but an opportunity to go deeper into reality.”

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1. ... the dangers of the systemic inequality we face here and now.

Anything and everything we can possibly do to raise awareness about the radical income inequity that threatens the fragile fabric of our democracy--that we MUST do, and more. We must not go quietly into their dark night.