Newtown Tragedy: The Horror of No Future

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http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6699/newtown_tragedy__the_horror_of_no_future


December 16, 2012
We are a society that creates child martyrs, in fiction and in reality, argues scholar of religion and literature, Jodi Eichler-Levine
By JODI EICHLER-LEVINE


"Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" –President Obama, speaking on Sunday night in Newtown, Connecticut

Jodi Eichler-Levine is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. She holds a joint appointment with the Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Youth Literature, forthcoming from NYU Press.

In Newtown, families are grieving dead first-graders. On the day of the killings, while I counted the minutes until I picked up my own daughter from daycare, I was haunted, for every one of those minutes, by a figure of contemporary cultural mythology, Katniss Everdeen.

Katniss, the bow-wielding Athena of The Hunger Games series, recognizes that it is actually senseless to bear children into a violent world. In the series' dystopian world of Panem, the power of the state in destroying young people is explicit and active: children 12 and older are placed in a lottery each year—a reaping—and selected to compete to the death at a moment of national spectacle, tribunes in a futuristic, reality-show arena.

In the very first chapter of the very first book, Katniss and her friend Gale contemplate the dawning of another year’s reaping. “I never want to have kids,” Katniss says. “I might. If I didn’t live here,” says Gale. Katniss, irritated, replies, “But you do.”

Yes, we do. We do live here. We live in an America with a high rate of gun violence. We live in a world where children die every day, from guns, from domestic violence, from car accidents, from wars (including bombs we have dropped), from starvation, from disease.

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