What are our Hunger Games? I’d start with the economy. The fact that tens of millions of Americans still can’t afford health care—especially but not only in states that have resisted Obamacare—means that losing the game can literally mean dying. Statistically, rejecting the Medicaid expansion means more than a thousand early deaths every year in my state, North Carolina, mostly among the working poor. That’s just one rule of the game.
Because it’s hard to unionize, a worker who asks for more is likely to be replaced by someone who will ask for less. Solidarity is harder, and people are pitted against one another. The 29 coal miners who were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia four years ago were non-unionized, which made it easier for their bosses to ignore safety rules and press for ramped-up production over human life. Don Blankenship, then-head of the company, has just been criminally indicted, but it’s five years too late. His policies made the workplace a Hunger Games arena of its own.
At the start of each Hunger Games, the contestants scramble for a pile of survival gear and weapons before taking off for the woods to hunt one another. In America, black children are born into families with about 10%—one-tenth—the average wealth of white families. They are born in neighborhoods with fewer business owners, fewer professionals—fewer of the patrons who can spot their talent and send the real-world version of those little silver parachutes that drop into the Hunger Games arena to save our heroes.
The Hunger Games Mockingjay’s moral core is solidarity: the Gamers start caring about one another and resisting the rule that only one contestant can survive the Hunger Games.
The political pivot comes when they realize that there could be a world without Hunger Games at all. The rules of this game are man-made. They benefit some people and hurt many others—even the so-called winners, who survive by becoming killers, then become the celebrity playthings of Capitol elites.
But once we understand that it’s the rules of the game that are the problem, we can see that no one needs to be racist for the system to keep spitting out racist results. No one needs to hate for a game to be hateful. Even “fair” rules, which treat every person alike, are not really fair if the contestants scramble across the starting line in very unequal situations, some with swords and bows, some with a little rope and a box of matches. The problem is that being a decent person in an indecent situation is not enough, even though it may also be all you can do.
This is especially hard to see because Americans, even more than other people, tend to see the rules of the market as natural and unchangeable facts. In American life, the familiar version of market competition is often treated as like the Law of Gravity, the kind you can’t change and defy only if you don’t mind falling on your face.
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