Hungry for a Kick-ass Heroine

At the urging of my college student daughter, I read and finished the The Hunger Games
trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I found them to be energetic and enjoyable reads to be sure, and am glad to see a character such as Kitness Everdeen take center stage as a model for young ladies.

Kitness is on the verge of womanhood and offers herself in place of her younger sister to take part in her dystopian society’s idea of fun, namely twenty-four teenagers battling to the death in this futuristic version of “Survivor.” Much like the current television series, alliances can be and are formed, but in this game contestants all know there can be only one survivor, literally.

Kitness kills people; others try to kill her. She joins forces with Peeta, a boy from her district, thinks she is falling for him, and is conflicted about these new found feelings and the feelings she has with the boy she left back home. She wins the games and, with Peeta, moves on to a bigger and better life until the next book and the next. Through a series of adventures, and a revolution to boot, Kitness becomes increasingly involved in a triangle with the two men in her life and at odds with a government hell bent on either killing them or breaking up whatever relationship they have going for them. Not to mention that the leaders of the revolution are really no better than the government they are trying to defeat. By the end of the trilogy, Kitness and Peeta are together, society is reformed, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Hunger Games and its two sequels are excellent reads and great escapism. Certainly they provide more realistic characters for young ladies to admire when compared to the previous craze of the Twilight novels.

Still, Collins could have made Kitness a bit more kick-ass. As she stands, she is a reluctant heroine. Stepping in to take her sister’s place seems spur of the moment, and her taking of the poison berries as she and Peeta are the ones left in the games does not arise from the defiant nature that the government perceives it to be.

Kick-ass heroines abound in literature, history, and film. Trinity from The Matrix.
Joan of Arc. Ripley from Alien.
Hell, Tank Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were all kick-ass. Kitness is hesitant in her actions, sometimes unsure of her own worthiness. True, she becomes more independent and more defiant as the trilogy continues, but she is still very much, well, a teenage girl finding love, and that is just fine. Kitness remains vulnerable, but it works.

***

Some critics of Hunger Games have claimed that Collins ripped off the idea from a 2000 Japanese film, Battle Royale. It is true that there are some similarities. It is also true that Hunger Games has a striking comparison to “The Lottery,” a 1948 short story by Shirley Jackson. That story went on to become a commonly anthologized classic story. It remains to be seen if Collins achieves the same level of esteem over time.

Vote For Burlington School Board

Again, I urge my former students and their parents to vote April 3 in the election for the two positions on the Burlington Area School District Board. I urge you to vote for the incumbents, Anderson and Kessler.

Here are some useful documents and links:

Absentee ballot information – dates and where to send, etc. (pdf)

Absentee ballot link – downloadable form.

District information sheet about the budget (pdf)

Other district notes (.doc)

The Burlington School District faces more reduction in state funding next year. That reduction in funding must be dealt with. The two candidates best able to do that and maintain the strength of Burlington Schools are Anderson and Kesler.

Lay off the Newtster

Sent via email to Rachel Maddow:

Rachel,

Echoing the sentiments of one of my favorite current writers, Christopher Moore, I am officially declaring you as my little sister. This is in part because my married status precludes anything else, but most it is because I admire your reporting, your commentary, and, frankly, your spunk.

That said, I must ask you to refrain from further disparaging Newt Gingrich’s idea of a colony on the Moon. It is not that I particularly like Gingrich. In fact, I don’t. He reminds me of pasty mashed potatoes and find his ideology utterly distasteful no matter how much gravy I could pour over him. Still, the idea of having a colony on the Moon is one that I would support.

We have as a nation abandoned space exploration and helping to build the Space Station and landing Rovers on Mars simply isn’t the same.

I grew up with Sputnik and Telstar being humanity’s first attempts to see what is beyond our atmosphere. Every time there was a space launch, I would stay home as late as possible to watch it before leaving for school. I had it timed perfectly to the exact amount of time it took me to run the four blocks to school and would sit patiently while they counted down. On those days when they had to stop the countdown and I could wait no longer, I would rush to school with a transistor radio just so that I wouldn’t miss it.

The nuns at our school frowned upon such radios, but I would still risk their wrath and covertly have the radio in my desk or pants pocket with a single earpiece wire strung through my shirtsleeve. I would sit, supposedly listening to the teacher, with my hand cupped over my ear, listening instead for those wondrous words, “Three, we have ignition. Two. One, we have liftoff.” Little did I know then that that earpiece was the earwig that Ray Bradbury foretold in Fahrenheit 451, or that it was a precursor to how we listen to most music today.

I mourned the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. Two and half years later, I sat with my parents and countless other millions of people to watch grainy black and white images of those first human steps on the moon. Those Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were among the heroes of my youth. Then came Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, in 1972, and we haven’t been back since.

Years later, space still intrigued me, and I applied for the ill-fated teacher in space program that NASA touted. I mourned Christa McCauliffe and the others. We had the Space Shuttle, to me a semi for space, but at least still manned. Now the shuttle program is over and we have to use Russian craft to send people to the Space Station. It is now nearly forty years since we have set foot on the Moon, and I am still angry about it.

It is true that space exploration is dangerous. It is true we have deficit and debt problems in the nation and that the needs of our poor are great. We can and should do great things, and shedding the chains of gravity is but one of those.

The space program of the 60s brought us many benefits, some trivial like powdered drinks, some useful like Velcro, and some more meaningful like the basis for much of the technology we take for granted today. More importantly, this nation jump-started an increase in funding for education. As a nation we collectively decided that expanding our knowledge of the universe was the right and proper thing to do. We came together as a nation in this goal. And, despite the cost of NASA, we also decided to fund Medicare and other social programs. In short, this nation can and should do great things at the same time regardless of the costs. The space program that I grew up with united our people, and that unity allowed us to accomplish great things beyond those footprints we left in the dust 238,857 miles away.

So, please stop disparaging Gingrich on this. We should not have stopped manned missions in space. We should have a colony on the Moon already. From there the stars are closer, our humanity can blossom, and we can once again achieve our full potential.

As Tennyson said, “… though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

We can still, as Ulysses, sail beyond the sunset.