The Hunger Games… by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

March 22, 2012 Whitney Farmer 6 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and hopes to go to France in August.   

A French military plane arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday, carrying the bodies of four French-Israeli nationals who had been slain at a school in Toulouse. Rabbi Jonathan Sandler will be interred beside his children Arieh (Arye), 6, and Gabriel, 3. Myriam (Miriam) Monsenego was just eight years old when the killer chased her down as she fled, then held the barrel of the .45 against her temple as he took her life. These killings must not be exalted into ‘executions’ as some commentary coins them because all of the judgments against the victims were concocted by 24-year-old Mohamed Merah and were the creation his own serial petty criminal imagination. These were murders without purpose or valor, like the slayings of the three paratroopers committed by Merah days before.  As Merah perpetrated his crimes, he recorded the events with a video camera for his future entertainment pleasure.

As the plane landed in the Promised Land to bring the victims home, security forces surrounded Merah’s apartment. Two French officers have been wounded, and the siege that must end in either the killer’s capture or death continues.

Already, commentators are questioning if there is a connection between the murders and the rise of isolationist rhetoric linked to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s upcoming election next month. Campaigning has been suspended, but not before the incumbent’s sentiments that France has too many immigrants have infected public discussion and consciousness.

As a former colonial power, France still suffers under the blindness of cultural superiority that puts other people at risk of suffering. Throughout its history, the country has wrestled between two philosophies that have shaped both foreign and domestic policy: association versus assimilation.  In the first posture, explorers traveled throughout the world with pride in the accomplishments of the French people but with an enthusiasm to learn about what cultures have that might contribute to the sum of enlightenment. What was best about both cultures was weighed and the best of both was incorporated.  This, however, characterized the minority of time in France’s colonial history. The most common approach began with an assumption that all things French were superior and must supersede what had developed in other cultures. As an example, if the language was superior, then beating children in Tahiti or West Africa for speaking their mother tongue was justified. Stripping a land of natural resources to be brought back to France was justified. The terrifying Borg of the Star Trek universe who soullessly inform, “You shall be assimilated…” could have been inspired from the roots of this arrogant political legacy.

Like other former colonial or imperial powers who can no longer get away with it, the “Ah Ha!”, “Oops!”, and “Mea Culpa!” moments are blended together in popular consciousness and sometimes in textbooks. The aggressors want the crimes to be forgotten despite the structural changes created by those offenses still being in place.  Many lands that had been exploited by expansionist nations still suffer the effects of resource depletion, social disruption from domestic warfare required for the chains of Colony to be broken, and a subtler but possibly more malevolent infection of an entire culture being told for generations that they are inferior.

Now France like the United States and other countries who have been bullies feed into this last consequence by championing reduced immigration policies, and forging new shackles on previously occupied countries in the form of unsupportable debt packages and inhumane trade practices.  And as diaspora try to find places in this world where they can put roots into the soil, politicians look for good us-versus-them material to use during election seasons. The poor and those with different colored faces end up looking in the window again as others are seated at the banquet.

In times like these and in places like Toulouse or Panem, children become first symbols and then casualties in the unholy reality show of politics. Watching a bloody spectacle unfold, the audience forgets how small and frightened the victims are.

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Quote of the Blog, from Nelson Mandela: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

Photo courtesy of ABC News.