You can’t blame 11 and 12 year olds for not understanding. But the adults who dreamed up and supervised this Very Bad Idea … well, ought not be left in charge of anything much more than a TV remote. Or maybe even that’s too much responsibility for them.
(H/T LA)
Wow. Just–wow.
While “The Hunger Games” (first books, and then film) is still in front of me on my reading list, it seems pretty clear from trusted commentary that to arrive at “That was, after all, the driving plot point of The Hunger Games…” requires a pretty substantial commitment to misunderstanding.
Sadly, many are fully capable and well-practiced in this art.
Then again, maybe they’re just being fully consistent here, with the way they look at the world. After all, given the “driving plot point of” The GULAG Archipelago, one sure could easily conclude that we’re all attending “GULAG Camp”…
I am flabbergasted. Not so much that some fool would think this up. There are plenty of really bad business ideas in the world. But that parents would actually send their children to some thing like this. That is mind blowing.
I am willing to bet that these parents never taught their children gun (or even knife) safety and would probably be horrified at my daughters real weapons skills.
Gah!
I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, so I don’t know for sure. But from the synopses I’ve seen, I don’t believe the writer was presenting the Games as a good thing. I mean, Suzanne Collins wasn’t making a suggestion, right?
So yeah. Missing the point badly.
Next year: 1984 Camp!
Wow.
Well, you folks who haven’t read the books or seen the one film that’s come out so far are in for a freedomista treat. (Movie better than the books, IMHO.) But yep. The games are not only no damn fun; they’re an act of oppression and tyranny by a government that’s as decadent as it is cruel — a government that forces its own young to destroy each other for entertainment and to remind everyone they’re just subjects without rights.
Yet another aspect of the not-getting-it-ness displayed by those who created and operated the stupid camp: Hey, kids, any adults who want to put you through Hunger Games don’t have your best interests at heart.
At least the last kid listed in the article had a taste of what the games were about. The main point of the Games is that the people gets stepped on by the Government, anytime and any place. The Games are the reminders of that.
How is this different from children, or young adults, or full grown adults playing football?
Or kids playing army? Or, Cowboys and Indians?
Heck, even Tag?
I saw the Hunger Games film.
Have you seen a nose guard or linebacker stare at you and say they are going to kill you?
Not that I’m defending anything, or saying any of it is right.
Just asking how it’s different?
[Cowboys and Indians, or Cops and Robbers, and Tag have all been outlawed nowdays, haven’t they? My how times change.]
Oh, and I wonder how the game is different from public school.
Young gladiators in training. Just like Rome, we have become…
“We like to do this cowboy style.” …
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/08/no_author/the-boston-bombing-the-cia-and-the-us-empire/
Even now, as I reflect, we had loads of fun playing ‘army’ or Cowboys and Indians.
Seems to me there was some difference between that and, Young gladiators in training.
…Or maybe not? Idk.
Am I the only one that thinks this sounds awesome?
The first thing that came to mind was “My, how times change”. I too used to play Cowboys and Indians (OK, I was a tomboy), and we used to shoot, fall down, get back up and switch sides, and never hurt one another or wanted to. We knew the difference between real and play and where to draw the line. When one kid got too serious or rambunctious and hurt another kid, there were always fights because that kid had stepped over the line.
The difference today, I think, is two-fold. One: kids haven’t learned how to use their imagination, and don’t know where to draw the line. Maybe being entertained constantly contributed to that, maybe the public schools contributed, maybe technology in general contributes by putting the real world out there and all they see is reality. (I don’t have answers here, I’m just observing.)
Two: adults don’t have the sense they _should_ have been born with. They don’t know how to distinguish reality from play either, and are too wrapped up in “this is popular, let’s try it to prove how IN we are” to think beyond the obvious or recognize unintended consequences.
In this case, they didn’t recognize the real message of the Hunger Games, and they don’t understand kids at all today, they just jerk them around like some inanimate object. It didn’t work this time…
Winston, it’s only “awesome” if they were teaching the kids to defend themselves and how to be self-sufficient and think on their feet. But I doubt the adults know how to do that either.
“But privately, she said the violence the kids had expressed was off-putting. She wanted the camp to focus on team-building activities.”
“Off-putting”? A better illustration of utter cluelessness I can’t imagine.
How is it that we tolerate the suspension from school of young children who point a finger and say “bang”, or who nibble a pop tart into the shape of a gun (allegedly), but permit this sort of exercise? These children are going to go back to school next month with this “training” fresh in their minds. How can we rationally punish any of them who carry it into the playground?
Oh, and I agree that the parents who sent their kids to this camp are morons.
Also, what makes this different from cowboys and Indians (in addition to the fact that it is organized and run by adults) is that they are killing each other as children. With other “killing” games they’re pretending to be adults engaging in an adult activity. Here, there is no pretense that they are anything other than children murdering each other. That was what made the Hunger Games so evil (yes, I’ve read the books and seen the movie), and it is what makes this camp so sick.
How about a “Lord of the Flies” theme park, too?
The comparison of the Hunger Games camp with the camp next door was significant. Next door the computer campers were playing video games where death was temporary, painless and without consequence.
Hunger Gamers realized that once lost, the flag was gone; alliances are good only so long as all members benefit from it.
Throughout the week each Gamer was learning skills. Hey, they were outside running, climbing, jumping and having fun. I agree with Winston: this is awesome.
By the way, I read all three books (#2 not the greatest) and preferred the books to the movie maybe because none of the characters looked as I had imagined them.
Laird, I especially liked your second comment.
I read the Hunger Games books a while ago but other thoughts have pushed most of the details from my mind. Growing up I played many violent games with my brothers and the other boys in the neighborhood. The girls only joined us for baseball, hide-and-seek, catching snakes, etc. We were all raised to never hit girls and, in the boy games, everyone got hit!
Our games, however, always had teams. The bright helped out the slower thinkers with tactics; the strong protected the weak. Each individual was expected to “take a hit” if it helped the team win.
The horror of the Hunger Games was that each youngster was expected to kill all of the others, even their “team mate” from their district. “Taking a hit for the team” is utterly different from killing your team mate. Katniss and Peeta won by forming an unbreakable alliance determined to live or die together.
The state wants us to be divided. We are encouraged to put our trust in a blue uniform against our neighbors. Even our own children are to be sacrificed to the whims of faceless “educators.”
The Hunger Games camp was good training for a career in government. Temporary alliances, backstabbing your “friends,” kicking the weak when they’re down. With training like this, one of these kids could become the U.S. president!
Being outside and running around have a great time = awesome
Showing up at Camp with the expectation that you really get to kill some one at the end of the week = poor planning
The adults fell down in this case because they followed one simple rule that those out of touch normally do: Find out what the Consumers want (free stuff, most popular game/book), lower cost of X…) and then structure a selling point to them based on bait-and-switch.
After all – saying that Kids would be going to camp to learn how governments oppress and the Citizenary stands by to allow it – well that won’t sell a lot of tickets. Throw a Wizard, Vampire or C.O.D. Plan up in the headline and anything is possible.
Free country and all that. I’d like to see something along the lines of a FireFox Camp – that would be awesome.
http://countryday.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/our-community-connects-through-social-media-hglargo/
Montessori Schools are quite interesting and I suppose this immersion was not designed to be quite as shown by MSM.
[How is this different from children, or young adults, or full grown adults playing football?]
Imagine calling both teams out to the middle of a football field and saying, “Okay, take off all your pads and forget about the ball. Now lets come to a consensus over who is going to score how many points.”
The Hunger Game was a Thunderdome-style “24 children enter, 1 child leaves” event. The book series is about how to respond to the kind of tyrannical government that would allow, much less require such. (With a savage twist at the end.)
I can see a “Hunger Games Camp” teaching young people very politically incorrect lessons, run by Claire, winston, et al. I’d volunteer, and send my grandkids after they grow up a bit.
But to use the story as the springboard for non-violent team-building exercises is breathtaking cluelessness, of the “Just negotiate with your rapist” variety.
And one of our local churches is offering a youth program split between “Princess Academy” for girls and “Survivor Camp” for boys. (The picture for the latter shows campfire + wiener on a stick.)
I keep wondering how they’d react to a girl who wants to learn to survive.
LarryA says, “Imagine calling both teams out to the middle of a football field and saying, “Okay, take off all your pads and forget about the ball. Now lets come to a consensus over who is going to score how many points.””
That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Is that what they were doing when they played The Hunger Games?
It’s an expansion of: there are no losers, everybody gets an equal first place ribbon?
LarryA says, “The Hunger Game was a Thunderdome-style “24 children enter, 1 child leaves” event.”
So it was a hyped up game of King The Hill?
If so, nothing new there.
I’m still not seeing how it’s, “Just negotiate with your rapist” variety.
RickB says, “Our games, however, always had teams.”
That seems odd to me.
We had many games where there were no teams.
The ‘I’ was more prevalent years ago, perhaps?
I feel sorry for you for having only team games.
[That doesn’t make any sense to me.]
It doesn’t make any sense to me either. That’s the point.
If you sign up to play football you expect to have two teams try to advance the ball by blocking, tackling, passing, kicking, etc. Once you eliminate blocking, et al, and ignore the ball, it’s no longer “football.”
[So it was a hyped up game of King The Hill?]
If by “hyped-up” you mean King-of-the-Hill where all the loosers end up dead. The whole point of a Hunger Game is to kill the other 23 children. As in render them physically dead, not just out of the game. No reset to a new life. Not much room for team-building there, as you must eventually betray every teammate and kill them to survive.
So advertising a “Hunger Game Camp” where you intend to eliminate violence and build teams is simply clueless as to what the Hunger Games represent.
Just lovely…this is what happens when you have an entire generation (or more) raised by video games and television. I don’t know…sometimes I think that perhaps the next generation just doesn’t deserve freedom, but then again, I have to remind myself that they have victimized by the government indoctrination camps for more than a decade during their critical formative years.