The Hunger Games, the US Government, and the Collapse of the Roman Empire

Hi everyone! I would apologize for my intermittent hiatus but I forewarned all my trustee listeners that I moved across like 6 states and my lovely internet pal Nikki reminded me I don’t need to apologize for things that warrant no apology. I also don’t need to constantly be available, publicly, especially when nobody is paying me to be.  Some big news: I moved to Atlanta! Still no idea what I’m doing, and I don’t have a job yet, but it DID feel like “home”.I am still, justifiably, an idiot. In reference to Strider, specifically. This will be covered in a separate episode when I dive into The Hunger Games love triangle & Katniss’ persona specifically.I got a request from a super cool gal to cover HPV specifically, and STD’s in general. This made my epidemiology heart SO happy, because I have an entire project on HPV vaccination and especially the need to target men for sexual health campaigns from grad school. I’ll be digging that out and getting to work on it STAT. Feel free to email or message me on my instagram @zedagrace if you have any (anonymous) stories you want me to include. So for today’s episode of “how much existential dread in the pathetic lack of leadership in the USA can I convey in roughly an hour”, we’re gonna use the trilogy of “The Hunger Games”, coupled with the collapse of the Roman empire. I was a teenager when these books came out, and like many fellow overachievers who didn’t need any persuasion to scavenge their summer reading lists, or lived in a mental fantasy world inside their brains because reality bites, I ravaged up the wonderful fictional content as entertainment, and nothing more. A cool story. A creepy dystopia. So you can imagine my dismay when I re-read these books recently, particularly in light of a pandemic and the insurrection on January 6th, and was confronted with a rather harsh reality of the USA.  Maybe it’s the cynical nature of adulthood, but re-reading these at 28, with a public health background was, honestly, terrifying.  If you’ve only watched the movies, I highly recommend getting ahold of the audiobooks or actual literature. The movies are very warped and, like most, leave out a few incredibly key aspects. Or you can just listen to me explain them. You won’t need to have read them to enjoy this piece, though I’m sure it would help. Let’s begin. The History of Panem (aka the USA’s future) The Hunger Games is set in a nearly post-apocalyptic North America, called “Panem”. “Disasters, drought, storms, fires, encroaching seas that swallowed up most of the land, the brutal war for the little sustenance that remained” is the precedent for how Panem emerged a “shining capitol, ringed by 13 districts” and tasked with bringing “peace and prosperity onto its citizens”. Or in other words, climate change happened.  In California alone, in 2020 over 4 million acres of land burnt, and if that’s not enough to draw sympathy, over 10,000 structures were damaged or destroyed. (I know property damage matters a lot more to SOME people, over here.) Arizona has been in a megadrought for 22 years, apparently, and those statistics from 2021 alone have indicated this to be the “new baseline”. (But who listens to scientists?) Not to mention the catastrophic flooding in Germany. But again, US citizens only align themselves with ethnocentric ideas for the most part, as it is ingrained in our public education framework and individualist mentality. (Greta Thunberg is just socialist propaganda, after all…) And yes, for those of you who keep up with the rest of my blog, I did ask my German lov