The Hunger Games: Refreshing my memory

I am actually one of the many people in the world who have read Suzanne Collins' book The Hunger Games before. I really enjoyed it the first time, though, so re-reading the first five chapters wasn't a big deal.

If you have not read the book before (or even haven't watched the movie somehow) here's what you should probably know: a while back there was a nuclear war during an uprising of the people against the government. The government won in the end and separated the people into twelve districts. There was a thirteenth but it was destroyed by more nuclear war. Each district has it's own specialty such as grains, coal, weapons, etc. The focus of the story, though, is the games the capital throws each year. Every year, every person between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the districts gets one slip with their name on it entered into a glass bowl. Then, when reaping time comes around, a representative from the capital goes to each district and draws out one girl name and one boy name. These are the chosen fighters from that district who are sent to the games. "What are the games?" you may be wondering at this point. Well, after the uprising, the capital decided that it needed a way to prevent anything like that from happening ever again. They decided that the best way to do this was to make the districts basically live in a state of severe poverty, and then have these "tributes" fight to the death. There would only be one winner.

To me, this idea sounds like someone in the capital's own Modest Proposal. Instead of eating children, though, they decided to just have them kill each other as entertainment.

This year's reaping was supposed to be Katniss's (the main character) last one since she was 18. However, when her sister's name (Prim) was pulled out of the glass bowl she did not hesitate to volunteer herself as tribute in place of Prim. And so her journey began...

Touring the Slaughterhouse

I was one of the 9 people who went on the slaughterhouse tour. You may be wondering why I'm writing this post on Sunday when we went on Friday. Well, the answer to that, if I'm being honest, is that I just did not want to think about what I had seen too in depth. 

This isn't because they did anything that I would call the police about or anything. In fact, the whole system was very well regulated and organized compared to what I had thought it would be after reading Slaughterhouse.  The people who gave us the tour were very friendly and readily answered all our questions (they literally had an answer for everything). The building itself seemed very up to date. But as soon as we got there and I saw trucks pulling in full of cattle, and thought about where they were going, I started feeling sick. 

There were so many small details that I could share, but I will stick with the biggest portions of the tour for this blog since it's already going to be pretty long. I apologize in advance.  

They told us when we started the tour that we would begin in the cleanest sections of the process and then work our way towards the more "messy" sections. Clean consisted of boxes and packaging of meat, which created a false sense of ease. 

The first room that really shocked me was this HUGE room just full of workers, of all ages, doing every job from cutting fat off meat, to cutting meat off of hanging carcasses. 
Throughout the whole tour the thing that struck me most was how each worker had a job where they did the same little task over and over. I don't know how they could stand doing that day in and day out. Especially not the job which I'm about to tell you about.. 

We walked into a hallway at one point, which I noticed had a little more blood on the floor than the other places, and above our heads there was a pulley system taking the hooves of cattle to a different room. At that point we were all asked if we wanted to see the sticking process. No one said no but there was definitely hesitation. The tour guide took three of us at a time into the room where it happened. As soon I walked in, I was assailed by the sight of freshly knocked cattle and a (this is the only way I could think to describe it) "WATERFALL" of blood streaming out of them into a dark red river below them as the worker cut their throats over and over and over.... While I was recovering from shock, the tour guide pointed out a man in a black hat and explained that his only job was to make sure that there were no conscious cattle coming into this room, otherwise he had to use a knocking gun on them again. So there's that. 

It was surreal seeing all that blood, though. I couldn't believe it.

Then immediately after that was the knocking room. I think this is the room that affected everyone the most, because, again, no one said no to witnessing the process. 

There were two cement walls blocking in the cattle, who were literally face to butt packed walking in, and then there were two workers whose jobs it was to keep the line moving. Moving forward. Straight to the other side...where the end was waiting. That may sound dramatic, but it was hard to not get a little emotional/philosophical as you watch the completely unaware cattle looking around the room...even making eye contact with us... and all I wanted to do was pet them all. Maybe even take them all home with me.. 

When it was our turn to see the knocking, of course something had to go wrong. The tour guide explained the process as we watched one cow after another come through the hole and immediately get knocked in the head by the gun (there is a rod inside it that is pushed by air, like a normal gun, and it's supposed to split the brain in half). Then one cow came through that the worker holding the gun could not reach since it put its head down. The worker immediately pushed a button to stop the process, and the cow started struggling and thrashing around. A burst of air in its face was all it took to get it to look up... and the process continued.

This whole experience is one that I know will stick with me forever. The scent of the slaughterhouse is still lingering in my nose. 

Though this particular company seems to have figured out better ways of doing things, I still feel like there are many flaws to the whole system. Visiting a slaughterhouse, though it may affect you deeply, is something I would recommend that everyone should try at least once. I doubt you would want to go a second time, though.

Chapter 6-13 of The Jungle

I was one of the people who had to read chapters 6 - 13 of The Jungle, which I was kind of happy about since that way I would not have to skip any chapters after our first assignment of reading chapters 2 - 5. 

Finishing chapter 5 left me with a sense that Jurgis and his family would have no more problems with the house and that the rest of the book would be focused on them just struggling with their jobs. This was partly true. Unfortunately, the house situation situation was not to end so easily, which is what I had been scared of. 

Though the housing agent may not have lied to them about not having to rent the house forever, he did leave out many other things. The biggest of these, which the family was most shocked to hear about (from their new friend Grandmother Majauszkiene) was that they had to pay interest. After that revelation, there was no way that Ona and little Stanislovas could avoid getting jobs any longer. The law was that no one under the age of 16 could work, though, so they had to lie and say that Stanislovas was two years older than he actually was. However, the bosses could have cared less about the law anyways. The younger the person, the less they thought they had to pay them. Stanislovas was paid about a third less than the average adult where he worked. This extra income helped Ona and Jurgis to get married in a manner that was acceptable to Elzbieta, who had grown up as a person of importance and, therefore, had certain standards for things of that nature. 

The part of this section of reading that really affected me was when winter time came around. 

Winter is a time that very few people enjoy in the first place. Add in having to work in negative degree conditions, and then coming home to a house that is almost just as cold because you cannot afford heating, and suddenly winter is unbearable. Poor Stanislovas even had to witness another young boy that he worked with have his frozen ears snap off. 

To avoid freezing themselves, many of the workers would try different tactics to warm up. Here is a section from one of the chapters that shows the extremes they would go to:
"Now and then, when the bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to the hot-water jets. "

It was especially dangerous for workers who used knives. They could not wear gloves and, therefore, ran the risk of their fingers going numb, which led to accidents. 

Jurgis' father, Antanas, ended up dying from a cough and other ailments that he actually contracted from working in such conditions and around chemicals. However, as the saying goes, the end of one life leads to the beginning of another. Ona gave birth to a strong baby boy and this happy event brightened Jurgis' whole world, but also gave everyone a reason to work harder.  

50 Pages of The Jungle

I read chapters 2- 5 of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. 

These chapters really brought to mind the reading I did of Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz. 

This man named Jurgis brought his family and the family of the woman that he planned on marrying, Ona, from Lithuania to America in search of a better life (about 12 people).
Knowing almost no English, they run into many troubles, including losing much of their small amount of money to swindlers before they finally find a man who was from Lithuania too. This man helps them by telling them about a cheap place for them to stay at while they get their feet on the ground.

This place was not nice in any sense of the word, but it was good enough for them to stay at for the moment. Jurgis wanted his future bride to have every nicety that he thought she deserved and would not even let her try to get a job when the rest of them went out looking. Because he was such a large man, he stood out in the crowd, outside of Brown's, of men trying to find work and within a short time was asked to come back at 7am the next day. Of course Jurgis was excited about finding work at the slaughterhouse, not knowing what the rest of us have learned in class about the terrible things that go on inside them. Jurgis actually went on a tour of the slaughterhouse before his first day on the job, which is what many of us will be doing on Friday. The tour only managed to brighten his thoughts of the factory, of course, because all the tourists were shown the brighter sides of the process. The only part that people seemed to be disturbed by during the tour was the killing of the pigs. The people humanized these pigs, thinking that they looked so innocent and went into their deaths so trustingly. This did not bother Jurgis, as he was so amazed by all the things he was being told about how the whole process made sure to not waste any parts of the animals and other such achievements. He did not even notice when an inspector stopped to tell the group about how his job was to check the animals to make sure they did not have any diseases or other things that would keep them from being edible. And as he spoke to the group, several cattle passed right by him unchecked.

The part of this story that caused me the most anxiety is when the family decided they wanted a house, and decided to go to an agent about a house they saw advertized. In my mind, that whole house sale process was a scam. I wanted to cry with them when they did not believe that first lawyer who told them that the deal was legit. In other classes I have had, we read about how people would take advantage of immigrants in their situation and take every last cent that they had. So when Jurgis, in his rage and fear, ran to another lawyer and was told again that the document was correct I breathed a sigh of relief with him.

Cajas de Carton

The author of Cajas de Carton is award winning Mr. Francisco Jimenez. He wrote this story about one of his experiences working in fields with his family in California. Originally, his family was from Mexico, though. He worked in the fields for many years and his family moved around a lot. 

I felt really sad as he described how he could only attend school contingent upon when he was not needed in the fields picking grapes, strawberries, and other things. It made me wonder, even though he said that he was entering 6th grade, if he should have been in a higher grade. School was an exciting time for him and his siblings because of that simple fact that they did not have to work, though. Also, you can tell by looking ahead in time to his master's degree and Ph.D that he must have really enjoyed learning. I would have been excited to get to take a break from the work he and his family were doing too! I can hardly stand being outside when the temperature is above 90 degrees, yet they were out in a field in 100 degree weather. Along with that, they basically only took a break at lunch in order to pick as many boxes full of products as they could. Then at the end of their long day of work they come back to relax in some guy's garage (living conditions). His mom and the younger kids got the mattress, and everyone else slept under a tree. That sounds great for a short camping trip or something, but this was how they lived their lives. 

Reading about his time in school was great, though. His teacher, Mr. Lema, was exactly what every good teacher should be. He cared about his student and even took extra time out of his day to help Jimenez. Mr. Lema even offered to teach him how to play the trumpet (going above and beyond). That moment when Jimenez comes home excited about the prospect of being able to play the trumpet, just to have his hopes dashed by those packed boxes, was heartbreaking.

My Very Modern Proposal

Recently, I had the opportunity to read Dr. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and, while he made very good points, I think that he may have gone a little off track (and a little too extreme) for helping the problems we have in our society. With this in mind, I would like to make my own proposal. Instead of focusing on getting children off the streets and helping our poor (both very honorable causes), though, I am going to center my ideas around food waste and the environment.

Americans throw away about 263 million pounds of food a day, much of that food still edible. Because of this, we end up with giant, unpleasant looking trash mounds that are filled with rotting food.That much food is piling up at an increasingly fast rate, with food taking a long time to decompose as more food is placed on top of it, along with all the packaging they come in. Soon we will start running out of places to put all our trash and we will begin competing for land. So I have thought up an idea to solve this war with our food: Turn all food into liquid.

Every single meal. Every fruit, vegetable, meat product, etc. as soon as they are picked or killed will be sent to a special "grinding house" where they will be pounded and ground down until everything is in its most liquid form.

This system will reduce the amount of paper plates, utensils, and even the packaging that is used to accommodate solid foods. You have probably noticed that the use of eco friendly mugs has been advertised a lot more in the past couple years to get people to use them more and cut back on the amount of water bottles they throw away each year. These reusable mugs are key to my plan. Each individual would have several eco friendly mugs. They then would take their mugs to the store, or restaurant, any time they want to get more food. At the stores and restaurants, people will be able to fill their mugs up at the juice stations; beef juice, ham juice, egg juice, and any other food you can think of. This cuts way back on all of the packaging that would be needed to hold these foods.

The best part of all of this is that even if you have leftover food it will not end up in a pile on land, polluting the environment, that we could be using for something else.  Instead you can pour it onto your grass or a body of water to be evaporated later. It is my sincerest belief that this system will work and that we should begin using it as soon as possible.

The Family: Rigoberta Menchu

Rigoberta Menchu grew up in San Miguel Uspantan and is part of the Quiche people. She wrote this testimony about her life at the age of twenty-three, which she notes at the beginning. 

Rigoberta makes it clear from the beginning that her life and the lives of her family members was not an easy one. Hard work and unfair treatment were apart of her life literally from her birth, since her mother basically had to rush home from the fields in order to not give birth to Rigoberta  on the plantation she was working at. Her family was literally always working, whether on a finca or on their own farm. Unlike the fincas, though, they actually enjoyed working on their own farm, which makes complete sense after you look at the way they were treated at the fincas. It made me so so sooo mad hearing some of the things that Rigoberta and her family had to go through. 

Skipping over the landowners and their treatment of their workers for a moment, the transportation that the workers used to actually get to the fincas in the first place really disturbed me. They had to take the lorry to get to town since they lived in the mountains. These vehicles were usually packed with people and their animals and took several days to reach town, so go ahead and imagine that smell. The smell would be overwhelming because on top of the fact that people were packed together with animals, there was also no opening to see outside or get any fresh air. This led to a lot of people puking. On top of that the drivers would drink alcohol and be very drunk during the journey (which is not safe - "don't drink and drive"), and would not stop to let people go to the bathroom during their trip! So sweat, animals, puke, and people wetting their pants. Yay. Roadtrip! No. It brings to mind learning in my history classes about the colonists sailing slaves across the ocean.

So they survive this trip and finally reach the finca (whichever one they're actually working at this time - cotton, coffee bean, etc.). People usually expect to walk away from a hard day of work with extra money in their pockets. However, for many of these people they walked away with much more debt than they came to work with. They are paid so little in the first place that it really is not that hard to spend it all, especially when the landowners are tricking you into spending it. Rigoberta recalls a time when her father, stressed and feeling low, went to the cantina to drink alcohol and forget his troubles for a moment. The overseers charged him for much more rum than he actually drank and put them in so much debt that it took them several work sessions to try and pay it off.

On top of the debt, Rigoberta lost two brothers to the working conditions, too. These people have to pick a certain amount of beans or cotton in order to "earn" their small wages, and that usually requires a long day of working in the heat. Rigoberta's youngest brother got sick from these conditions and malnutrition, and then his mother was forced to watch him die because she could not afford medicine for him. In fact, if it was not for her caring neighbors she would not have even been able to afford to bury him. The sense of community and looking out for one another that Rigoberta's family and neighbors acted with was the main thing that brought back my faith in humanity.

A Modest Proposal: What the heck...

Well, I just read A Modest Proposal and I can assure you I have a very strong opinion about this piece. Here we go...

First of all, I was warned about this piece of writing by our classmate Brooklyn, who had read it before me, with the heartfelt, and accurate, statement, "It was messed up." 

I have to admit that the first couple lines that the author, Dr. Jonathan Swift, wrote had me wondering what she was talking about. It seemed to me that he would just be discussing the poverty rate in his kingdom and how that was affecting the lives of the children. I was partially right. He did discuss something that would definitely have a large affect on their lives... 

The line that slapped me in the face and made me realize how "messed up" Dr. Swift and his ideas for bettering the kingdom were, was, "...a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled..." 

He deceived me. Dr. Swift is a deceiver. I say this because literally right before he sprung this little thought on me, he had been discussing how voluntary abortions were a horrid thing because that was sacrificing "poor innocent babies," and the whole time I was reading that I was just nodding my head, agreeing, and (to be honest) zoning out a little bit. Dr. Swift's brilliant solution to ending these "sacrifices," though, was to wait until the children were one year of age and then to sell them as food. This way they would be nice and plump (perfect size for you to feed your guests). Oh! Then, he points out several of what he believed were the benefits of this plan, one of which was that mothers would treat their children better and be more affectionate to them. He thought that if they knew their children would be worth money then they would be more kind. Same with the husbands. Dr. Swift thought that if they knew that the child their wife was pregnant with would earn them money, then they would beat their wives less so as not to accidentally cause a miscarriage. Brilliant. I am a big mixture of disturbed and angered by this whole piece.

What was even more concerning was when I began relating this to our recent trip to KLF (Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes). I know that that is kind of a weird leap of topics, but just think about it. What if we did not have organizations that fed the hungry like that? Or what if we did not have people who put their minds and talents together to help their community? Would we just say, "Well, I hate seeing people go hungry, so maybe we should just pay them to let us eat their children. I'm sure that will fix everything!" The fact that that thought even enters someone's mind is pretty scary, especially when they take it as far as to propose it to a large amount of people like Dr. Swift did. Also, one more creepy thought: Dr. Swift kept referring to how tasty of a replacement for animals children are... Does this mean he has already tasted/eaten the meat of a child? 

At the end of this whole disturbing proposal, Dr. Swift throws in something very interesting. He makes sure to point out that his daughter is 9 and, therefore, past the eating age and also that his wife can no longer have children. This statement then begs the question, would Dr. Swift sell his own child to be eaten (he seems to mock anyone who thinks doing this would be a bad idea) or is he just a really big (crazy) hypocrite?

UPDATE: I wrote all of this before I read the "historical context" that Dr. Allen provided for us. Let me say that after reading that I feel much better about Dr. Swift. Realizing that he was just using this strong and disturbing proposal for a change in Ireland to shock their leaders (who had ignored all his other ideas) into action really changed my opinion on the whole piece. I still find the whole thing highly unpleasant, but now respect his motives behind writing it and understand his anger towards Ireland's leaders at the time.

Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes: The Website

Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes has a really well set up website which lays out things that you would want to know about them and more. My favorite part of their website is the bottom right side of their home page, which has a section titled "Hunger Stories." This consists of testimonies about KLF from actual people who use their services. Sometimes you need to see more than just numbers to know that something is working (at least in my opinion).
Much of the food that KLF distributes to the hungry in Kalamazoo's community is donated from either the rest of the community or larger food drives.
This whole service was created in 1982 by a group of churches. They were concerned about getting more food out to the hungry in their community, so they combined their resources.
If you need proof of how effective they are, they do provide you with some numbers.
In 2012, they reported getting food to about 127,000 people. That totaled up to about 1.6 million pounds of food distributed out to the Kalamazoo community.
On top of this, KLF also provides "prepared meal support, senior commodity programs, agency food support, food packs for kids, and other community food programs." They do not make feeding people a competition with the other food programs in the area. Instead, they help these other programs by sending them food.
One of their programs is called "Weekend Food Program." This consists of sending participating schoolchildren home each weekend with a food pack. I really liked this program in particular because if you think about it, schools have programs (at least mine did) where they have cheaper lunches for kids who sign up for it because of financial troubles, but as soon as they get home they are stuck with whatever their parents manage to get. With the "Weekend Food Program", though, they do not have to worry about searching for food on the weekends.

The Dinner of Trimachio

I just finished reading The Dinner of Trimalchio which is just a portion of the Satyricon. This was probably one of the most emotion filled, chaotic dinners I think I have ever read about. Everything was extravagant the whole time, too; the house, the food (the amount of food), the slaves, the guests, and the host... especially the host.

In the beginning, I had the impression that the narrator was going into Trimalchio's house as a sort of spy, per se, who had heard of his extreme excess and luxury and was going to report disgust at what he found.

I was pretty off.

The narrator seems to be a guest invited along with many other guests, most of whom apparently are scholarly and even free-men. We learn that Trimalchio is a fellow free-man. This means that he used to be poor and in service, but through different circumstances eventually rose to his current position in society.

There are moments when Trimalchio seems almost likeable. I respected his leniency with his slaves and also his proclamation that he would make all his slaves free-men, even though that would not happen until he died (In those days I'm sure this was a big deal).Trimalchio even went so far as to, to the dismay of the narrator, allow his slaves to sit with his guests during the feast. Something else that he did that I enjoyed was having all of his food made or grown from his own supply instead of shipping things in. I thought this really tied into what our class has been discussing lately. Trimalchio had all of his food made fresh which is, I believe, how we all think our food should be served. However, there did seem to be an over-excess of food, which was actually normal for the wealthy in that time period, but that led to a lot of waste of food. Wasting food is a modern problem as well though. 

My original idea that the narrator was going to be a sensible individual and very unlike the rest of the characters, though, was quickly dashed as I read more through the story. While the whole dinner was odd, things did not really start getting weird until Trimalchio decided to move the dinner party into the bath area.

The narrator initially tries to get out of this by sneaking away but is stopped by the labyrinth that is Trimalchio's doors.

Taking part in the bath festivities meant that he was also privy to Trimalchio's moment of rage toward Fortunata, his wife. She had yelled at him for kissing one of the slave boys for too long and that made him very upset and defensive. He went into a fit of anger towards her, and at one point said he had done nothing wrong because he had kissed the boy because he was smart and not because he was attractive... I don't know. I think if I was her, even though that excuse made so much sense (can you feel the
sarcasm?), I still would have been a bit upset.

The dinner is later broken up when Trimalchio, completely drunk at this point, decides to stage his own funeral and sets one of his slaves into a loud fit of mourning which eventually brings the police and fire men barging in. The narrator finally sees his chance to escape and takes it with his friend Ascyltos and Giton. After that, my understanding of the book's events kind of dwindles. The focus of the story goes from the narrator basically documenting the events of Trimalchio's feast, to, out of nowhere, his strong emotions towards Giton (his 'brother' - *wink wink*) and his own life.