Well, it’s god-awful late, but I knew I wouldn’t write this if I didn’t now. I had a lot of thoughts on Mockingjay and figured I wanted to make the most of the ticket my dear fellow Jake purchased for me. So here it is. Oh, and before I forget,

SPOILER ALERT.

I’m not going to provide a synopsis of the book portion or the film for the sake of time. But I will provide my experience of it.

The condition of government.

The 12 districts lost a war to a government that controls everything, feeds off the wealth of the districts, in exchange for not being decimated. What a life.

I was going to watch the presidential speech before the movie, but two things. First, I had life group, and I knew the discussions would be more wholesome and leading to being a whole person than listening to someone who himself isn’t whole. Second, no major news stations were even showing the speech. Which was on immigration. The only channel showing it, of course, was a Latin-American channel. Injustice comes when you only care about the issues that seem to affect you directly. Because, in a democracy, if you don’t treat all human issues as equally important, then you don’t treat all humans as equal. And doesn’t that go against our Constitution in all practicality? And what good are ideals if they aren’t put into practice.

Apparently the fictional characters in Big Bang Theory and Grey’s Anatomy are of more value in our society than the real characters whose selves and families and businesses are affected by real policies controlled by real people we really chose with our voices or lack thereof.

I wanted to watch our president speak, though, not because I’m particularly fond of him or his policies or his ways of finding loopholes in certain checks and balances, but because, no matter who the president is, have a responsibility as a participant in democracy — a democracy which the oppressed have fought for me to participate in freely — have a responsibility to be informed about what is going on in my country, and to consider how best to deal with it according to our ideals pertaining to human value.

In the Hunger Games series, the Capitol’s government system uses entertainment and pretense to quell the people, while also backhandedly threatening them. It’s all so fake. It’s like this in our government too. We treat our politicians just like our celebrities, and sometimes they even collaborate to entertain us, so we can gossip about them and blame them on our couches in our cities with hungry children we don’t consider ours like we consider our couches “ours.” The biggest difference is, the people in those districts care more than we do, and yet they have much less power to affect the government than we do.

The nature of the rebellion.

The rebels are portrayed in the Capitol as bad. I think, in our society, our rebels are portrayed instead as harmless and boring. The rebels are full of more love and passion and fire than anyone, and it’s contagious. But in our society, the pretense the world puts on about these rebels makes them look just like everyone else.

We tell our teens that drinking and partying and drugs and sex and feeling good, or rather, numb, is rebellion. But really, this is the least dangerous thing, the least adventurous thing, the least influential thing. People have been doing this for years. The real rebellion is one of love. Not the numb feeling of love, but the one that causes you to lay your life down for, how about, women who have murdered their children because they were told it would be good for them. I love those women and their children. I wished I loved them more. I wish YOU loved them more, and that’s part of the reason I’M here. I wish I loved my coworkers more, but I often fall into the conformity of just going to pay my bills and do my time, instead of to love people and work toward their ultimate good until it hurts.

Also. The way the rebels governed themselves. It kind of imitated the government, in that, every speech was a show But it was more of a work of art, a public relations kind of thing. Even in a good movement, you must control how you communicate, what words you use, and keep them pure.

The sad part for me, and what hit me, was that, Alma Coin, at the end, celebrated the return of the tributes from the Capitol. Yet she said not a thing about Peeta’s brainwashing, Johanna’s similar skin-and-bones appearance that resembled a prisoner of war, that their very souls had been ripped away from them.

I often think the leaders of Good Rebellions experience great isolation, because they want to keep up the morale of their people, and for good reason, and yet, they have battles of their own that nobody sees. What’s to come of this? I guess, just realize that the people you look up to are dealing with dark things. And that is often why their value systems are so strong. Because they have to be. Pray for the Good Leaders, if you do that sort of thing, and even if you don’t at the moment, because it’s gonna be powerful in the upcoming moment.

Oh, and when they put socks over the rebels and shot them. This reminded me eerily of the Islamic State’s BROADCASTED slaying of anyone in the way of their plan to dominate the world. This is real, but in our world, it’s more gruesome. But, I suppose the most gruesome deaths are broadcasted neither on the TV that sings you to sleep in your safe, safe country, nor the ultrasound in a room where all odds are against the underdog who has no voice in the matter, and the mother who is told she isn’t strong enough to be what she already is

The shock of what Peeta does at the end.

Before I saw this movie, my friends and I watched a typographic video called “Jesus is… Loving Barabbas,” which is  part of a Judah Smith series. Barabbas was this greasy murderer, and when put on a stage with Jesus, the people said they’d rather have Barabbas running around their town with their kids than a perfect man. Well, in this video, Judah brings up the idea that Jesus loves Barabbas. But also that Barabbas is me and you. We all deserve punishment for our sins, whether murder or hatred or lust or apathy. And Jesus took all of our places on the cross.

This made me think of Katniss’ love for Peeta. He tried to kill her. Because of the lies he believed in, that society and government told him, he believed he was justified. But the truth is, he tried to kill her. Yet once she wakes up again, it’s implied that what she’s panicking about is whether Peeta is okay after having been knocked unconscious himself.

And Gale. He did more for Katniss than Peeta did the whole time. He even selflessly went to get Peeta for her. What more could she want in him? Katniss loves Gale, but the love she has for him is different somehow than the love she has for Peeta. I think what she has for Gale is this gratefulness for what he does, yet also a compassion for his pain. But the love she has for Peeta is more like the love Jesus has for Barabbas. Though he was, in reality, a murderer, given the right circumstances… she didn’t see that as a part of him. Because, in all reality, that isn’t who he is. We are not what we do. That would make us unequal. But we are equally loved, and that makes us equally worth fighting for. What will it take for us to see past peoples’ wrongs toward us and see their infinitely valuable hearts? I know. It takes someone seeing us for who we are beyond how we perform. Have you ever had someone see you that way?

Because of Jesus’ love for us, we are no longer defined by our sin, either. Our sin is nailed to a cross, and we are born, another time, with a new identity, where our sin isn’t attached to us anymore, but to Jesus instead.

 

So yeah. I liked the movie. I like most movies, though, because, for some reason, fictional worlds have a way of telling us about our real world better than any news station or talk show or propaganda ever could. Because we’re not so numb to it when it’s shown to us from a different perspective.

My last thought is that, most of the time, good rebels get scoffed at for being too extreme. But I’d argue that, if you’re not extreme about your love, then why are you here? Really. Can you answer that questions. Because anyone can compromise to fit in. It takes a rebel to lay down his life for his friends, to take the sentence of a murderer, to pay off an infinite debt. There was once a man who didn’t compromise his love for me, not for a moment, though it killed him. Though I killed him. If he didn’t compromise his love for me, maybe that’s strong enough to keep me just extreme enough to keep caring about this faint, faint thing we call justice.