The Hunger Games

The days of the pre-apocalypse are upon it. I know it for sure now.

Like many people, for the past several years, I have been watching as things have been falling apart---civility, liberty, democracy, the rule of the law. Along the way I have felt a deep need to share my alarm with other people, as if to warn them, to spread an awareness, as if somehow the trend could be stopped or reversed.

But I know now that it cannot be reversed. I know that things must get must worse before they get better. There are dark times ahead for all of us. There is nothing that can be done to stop it now.

This profound sad awareness has been growing in me steeply over the last six months. But tonight I think it hit full force. I can't pretend anymore.

I hadn't even heard of The Hunger Games until two weeks ago. I had a vague consciousness of it from walking through Barnes and Noble. Then I started to see it mentioned everywhere on the Internet. I learned that it was a book series. It was a movie, I learned, about to premiere.

So about two weeks ago I sought out a plot synopsis of the series. Nothing prepared me for what I read. Sure, it was post-apocalypse, a brutal dystopia.

But nothing so brutal and bleak had ever been as popular as this, as popular as the Twilight or Harry Potter series, which seem so tame and innocent by comparison.

The parking lot of the Cinemark was packed full. The movie was showing in six auditoriums. There were lines outside the theater organized by showtime by the staff, the demand was so large. When I drove up, there were probably two hundred people waiting for the five o'clock show.

The auditorium was packed. I sat crammed in the third row between a teenage girl with her mother, and a group of three college women. Behind me was a row of high school students.

I won't belabor the movie. Go see it for yourself if you want to know. As a sci-fi movie, it was certainly very good.  I have nothing against it as a production. It certainly as a good story. It kept me interested from the start to the end.

But none of that matters. What matters is that this is the most popular movie in the country, and will be the most popular movie of the year.

Afterwards I sat in my car in the parking lot for about fifteen minutes just staring off through the windshield.

At least I don't have to deal anymore with the manic feeling of having to tell people what I see. There is no point in it.

So this is 2012, I thought. This is where we are right now...