When I was growing up, I ate
books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out
of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older
brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future,
but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.
Some of them -- Robert
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of
their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to
the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in.
Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but
its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and
a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is
even more relevant now. Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the
deep desert.
We now live in a world that
is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times
faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older
brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we
landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the
promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when
genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and
nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling
young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very
moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set
in a dystopian future North America , a
continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent,
luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an
uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to
intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two
adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial
Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.
That these 24 youths battle
each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like
-- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst
and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life
situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few
weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the
epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better”website,
film, and books aspire to reduce.
But really, in this moment,
the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The
Hunger Games reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the
land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles
Now, in our world,
gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly
separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports
that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while
the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from
the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia
In Iraq
Then, of course, there are
thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in
previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple
missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and
mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more
devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan
Our wartime carnage has been
on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s
generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government,
which censored images of returning coffins, corpses,
civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our
science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has
still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other
things -- including reality TV, of course. The US
Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan
The Return of Debt
Peonage
In The Hunger Games,
kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery -- that
is, extra chances to die -- in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor
kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic
doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high
school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor
young women for sex work abroad.
And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far
more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young
are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent
future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt --
usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in
turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy -- no
matter what. In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your
life.
One of my close friends wept
when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan,
structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for
the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers
and workers in company towns used to incur.
In other words, we’re
creating a new generation of debt peonage. And my friend is not the worst case
by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at
Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which
participants were to write their debt. What shocked her was how many of
the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.
According to the website for Occupy Student Debt,
36,000,000 Americans have student debts. These have increased more than
fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion
dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their
educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap
nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1magazine:
“Since 1978, the price of
tuition at U.S. U.S.
About a third are already in
default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike
against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and
have a debt jubilee.
The rest of us, the 99%,
need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has
everything to do with slashed tax rates -- to the wealthyand corporations in particular -- over the last 30 years.
We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make
your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of
being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the
hunger labyrinth.
The Labyrinths of Poverty
Which brings us to the
hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The
wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry
people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing,
food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and
force by the Occupy movement.
One of the sad and moving
spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de
facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for
the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who
cooked superbly. They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor
received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.
We are in a new era of
desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades
aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that
workers can barely survive on them.
Of course, we do have one
arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing.
Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside.
It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the
world, higher than in the USSR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there
for drug offenses, 80% of those for simple possession.
Which, as I’m sure you’ve
noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good
at creating here. We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering
(GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan
And once our prisoners get
out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this
economy -- speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life, and
hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who
are the raw material they process. In this age, both systems seem
increasingly like so many factories.
In the Shadow of 900
Tornados
But if you want to think
about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in
the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or
human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s
climate change, of course.
Our failure to do anything
adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben
so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book Eaarth. His argument is that we’ve so altered the
planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra
“a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful
Holocene one we trashed.
There were 160
tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April
of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States USA Texas
One grain of good news: a
lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness
of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Timesreported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of
Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s
blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by
global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been
getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”
If you want to talk about
hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan China
Around this point in science
fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good
news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.
Revolution 2012
2011 was the year of strange
weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from
over. They erupted in Russia ,
Israel , Spain , Greece ,
Britain , much of the
Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa, and Chile ,
among other spots in Latin America (some of
which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have
blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol,
the United States , and much
of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand
Remember that revolution
doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde
aspect of the very violent Hunger Games trilogy, the way in
which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned
lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning,
whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the
Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the
Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its
wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll
notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers
were subjugated by these means.
Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in The Unconquerable World, it’s what the state uses
when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of
“nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate
our own power. That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an
absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake -- as
demonstrators around the world proved last year -- is a force to be reckoned
with; so call it “people power” instead.
When we come together as
civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not
instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?
Still, many regimes have
been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.
As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of
Nonviolent Conflict, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful
in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.
It’s May Day, a worldwide
General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma Chicago
will hole up at Camp David instead.
Meanwhile last week, both
the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege
from Occupy activists. The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in
San Francisco
In this way do fiction and reality
meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike, and even Golden Gate Bridge
Still alive and kicking,
Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization
that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding
a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on
the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.
Of course, this is only a
beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1%, and the prison and
education rackets are more than capable of pushing back. So we need one
more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a
better world looks like. McKibben’s Eaarth and Deep Economy offer such a picture, as does
William Morris’s News from Nowhere, even 120-odd years
later, but we won’t get that from The Hunger Games, which, for all
its thrilling, subversive, and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way
home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.
May Day is a day
of liberation -- a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was
shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who
fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and
profound possibilities might look like.
So skip work, flip a bird at
the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives
are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our
planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big
about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a
pleasure and a way of stealing back hope.
Rebecca Solnit grew up in
California public libraries and is thrilled to be revisiting them all over the
state as part of the Cal Humanities California Reads project, which is now
featuring five books, including her A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That
Arise in Disaster. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books remain her favorite young-adult
fantasy series, even though she found The Hunger Games trilogy
irresistible.
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