Um, we're certainly, you know, we're not  taking children out of slums in South America and putting them into an arena to fight to the death so, we're not, like, as complicit in as much evil as, um, as the people of the Capital in Panem but we are complicit to an extent. Like, you could easily make the argument that we care more about the well being of our lawns than about the well being of people in the developing world and it's, it's, it's really easy, like Effie Trinket is always like, talking about how rude something is while participating in the slaughter of children. She's like "Oh, that's so, don't stab that table well, it's mahogany!" and it's like you clearly care more about the table than you do about the fact that you're like sending a child to die and, and but, and, and she does this really well, she actually outlines that Effie is not really a bad person. She's just had the same message being whispered into her ear for her whole life. You know, it's been 75 years since the Hunger Games began. Effie Trinket is probably in her thirties or forties, so, so this is like not since she was born but probably since her parents were born.

This has been an institution. Like, there is no one alive in the Capitol, roughly who remembers life before the Hunger Games, and what they would remember would be a horrible, horrible, horrible life of war, and destruction, and all kinds of bad stuff. So, you can understand, and Suzanne Collins is a does a really good job of this, you can understand, if you're looking at this sort of implication, this broader messages. She actually outlines the fact that the people, of the Capitol, who are complicit, um, you can understand why. Now, the interesting thing to me is that when I read the Hunger Games as a dystopian science-fiction novel that the message is very clear to me, but, it seems like most of the people are missing the message. And that message, is that, like, it matters more whether or not we're rude and if we, like, conform to social norms, like wearing normal clothes and not saying bad words in front of little kids than that matters more than whether or not you're helping children not die of malaria. Like, it's infinitely...it is inarguable that it is worse. It is more important for me not to say 'fuck' in the mall, like in front of little kids than it is for me to use some percentage of my time and income to help not let little kids not die. Like, which is obviously more important?! We should be helping them not die. Like, we should care about them not dying than which four-letter word they hear, but that's not how we behave. We behave as if the 'fuck' is the biggest tragedy of the day, because that's what's most shocking. And this is all social, and we're stuck in culture, and that's the message that Suzanne Collins gets out there, eventually. And I think that it feel like it takes...I think in the second novel you sort of start to get an idea that Effie doesn't even really notice that what's she's doing is wrong. And, it takes her so long to figure it out, because we are stuck in culture. Like, we breathe culture, like, we choke without it. And what we're raised in is so hard to remove ourselves from. And what we have is a culture that is shocked more by curse words than by starving people.

And that's because, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think that what we need to, like, our goal as human beings and as Nerdfighters is to try and change culture, like so that we can live in a world where hunger is not okay, where war is not okay, where, you know, like, we just don't accept those things. And if we can get into that culture, then at some point, maybe we can live in a place where there is no hunger, because we didn't accept it anymore, and it has to go both ways. You know you have to start decreasing hunger, and then you can call hunger more of a tragedy, because when the number of people that there are right now in abject poverty without clean water and enough food. You can't say that hunger isn't okay, because it has to be okay, because there is...literally, it's unavoidable. Like, we can't fix that problem in the next five years. That would be wonderful if we could, but we can't. 

But the point is, the "Metaphorical Implications" is that is was okay for a couple of guys to go to a grocery store and, like, buy enough food to feed a kid in South America for a week, just for the 'lols,' but it's, you know...And we have to be silly, we have to have a good time, we can't, you know, spend all of our time and money, and all of our sort of, like mental health on, uh, trying to, like always focusing on the world's problems.  

But, the point being that the Hunger Games is a very serious book with a very serious message that our culture accepts things that it should not, and our culture is accepting things that are not as bad as what's happening in the Capitol, but they're bad, and we accept them. And we are much more shocked by little, stupid things than we are by big, gigantic tragedies, that we all, you know, as a human organism face constantly on this planet.

So, that's what I wanted to talk about and that's it. We are cultural beings like fish are water beings. But, unlike fish, we can change culture and make it better for all the fish. Goodbye.