The "Hunger Games" movie has dominated the box office for the last few weekends and it will be interesting to see if the trend holds this weekend. It's a great movie and a great book. What do The Hunger Games mean to me? It makes me think of the fragility of civilization. We tend to think that the world we live in is a given, that things are simply meant to be this way. We forget that civilization is man-made. We forget that over the course of history most people have not lived in freedom or prosperity. We who are lucky enough to live in societies where individual freedom and liberty are valued, where there is access to education, health care, and an economic system that promises advancement should realize that these societies exist only because someone cared enough to create them and defend them. Even today, there are countries where the entire purpose of the government and all the institutions of society exist not for the benefit of the people, but to keep one person in power. Syria and North Korea spring to mind, but there are other examples. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy joins Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 in reminding us that civilization is both constructed and fragile and if it is to endure we must be willing to do our part to preserve and advance it and hand it off to the next generation.
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