What moves you

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"We're already in the Hunger Games, kiddo."

"We're already in the Hunger Games, kiddo."

A conversation with my 12 year old about current events.

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Naomi Gottlieb-Miller
Jun 27, 2025
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"We're already in the Hunger Games, kiddo."
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Hunger Games District 8, screenshot

“I think in 20 years our government is going to look like the Hunger Games government,” my 12 year old said to me in the car the other day. We were having a fairly intense conversation about current events when she made this casual statement. She added, “I don’t necessarily think they’ll start killing kids, Hunger Games-style. But I think that it will start to feel like the Hunger Games here.”

My response was immediate and certain. “We’re already there, kiddo. They might not be rounding up all of the kids in every state between the ages of 12 and 18, picking 2 at random and then pitting them against one another in a deadly arena as a spectacle of cruelty. But they are killing kids. They’re just doing it with punitive policies and misinformation instead.”

She didn’t expect that.

But it’s true.

In the next 5 minutes, while navigating rush hour traffic, I tried to explain what I meant.

I told her that even though we are fortunate to have health insurance, not everyone does. Some people can’t afford it. The fact that our health care system is “for profit” instead of “for health” really tells you everything you need to know.

When health insurance isn’t affordable or accessible, people will be unable to get care when they are sick or injured.

I told my kiddo that this means that there are kids whose parents don’t have health insurance and when they are sick, their parents have to decide whether to take them to the hospital and go into debt or just keep them home and hope for the best.

She was shocked to hear this.

I mentioned that there is a “big bullshit bill” that the felon-in-chief is trying to push through congress and if it does, even more kids will be without health insurance – an estimated 1 out of 5 kids currently enrolled would lose coverage.

My daughter asked, “why wouldn’t they want kids to be healthy?” Which is an excellent question.

The answer is essentially, that they only want certain kids to be healthy – once again, “hello, Hunger Games.”

In a press release, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson suggested that "Republicans are protecting and strengthening Medicaid for American citizens who need and deserve it by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse."

Essentially, Speaker Johnson and the rest of the Republicans in congress believe that some Americans simply don’t deserve to be healthy.

Playing G-d with people’s lives through an unjust health care system is just one of the ways that the government is pitting the citizens of this country against one another.

It might not be an elaborately designed arena of death that is televised for the whole nation to see. But it will kill kids all the same.

I talked to my kiddo about how restricting reproductive rights also harms kids – the opposite of what this administration says they want.

Not only is abortion up – the number of abortions per year has risen dramatically since the Dobbs decision 3 years ago – but infant and maternal mortality rates have also increased significantly. This is not correlation but causation. When it is unsafe to even have a miscarriage in some areas of the country, women and children will die.

There are women who are now unable to become pregnant again thanks to hospitals refusing them care until they’re nearly dead because of restrictive laws on BASIC MEDICAL PROCEDURES that would terminate a pregnancy that is either dangerous for the pregnant person or no longer viable. So while they are not killing children, hunger games style, these laws are, in effect, preventing children from being born. That’s a neat trick.

However since republicans define personhood as beginning in utero, this administration is actually directly responsible for the death of a child.

A woman named Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus was 5 months pregnant when she was detained by ICE. She is engaged to an American citizen, whose baby she was carrying when ICE arrested her. Despite her pregnancy and despite begging for care, she wasn’t given adequate food or medical support while she waited to be deported in a correctional facility and she ended up losing her pregnancy.

Her health and her unborn child’s health were not important, I guess, because she wasn’t the white kind of mother.

I didn’t learn about Monterosso-Lemus until writing this piece, but I did explain to my daughter that when women don’t have the right to make health care decisions about their own bodies, it becomes unsafe for them to be pregnant.

Further, when the government interferes with those choices and they’re already pregnant, if they are forced to continue the pregnancy and it doesn’t kill or harm them, it will often impact how well they are able to care for other children they already have – because the anti-choice people are far less concerned about caring for parents and children once a pregnancy is over. The quality of their lives postpartum is inconsequential.

And yes, I think this is important to tell a kid with a uterus, regardless of her age. Because she needs to know how certain people view her autonomy and how dangerous pregnancy can be within a system that doesn’t care if you live or die.

That said, reproductive rights are still a little bit of a tricky concept for my 12 year old to understand. But she sure as shit understands how this administration is treating gay and trans kids like they are in the Hunger Games.

They’re not pitting them against one another in a survival fight to the death. They’re just making life unbearable for them by stripping them of rights and safety. In addition to making it even more difficult for trans folks of all ages to access gender affirming care, this administration is also ending the specialized suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth on the 988 Suicide and Crisis Line.

Gay and trans kids are at a significantly higher risk of suicide or self harm than non-gay or non-trans kids. According to the Trevor Project, around 40% of LGBTQ+ kids have considered suicide in the last year. The 988 Suicide and Crisis line made it easier for those kids to have access to mental health support without having to go through their parents – which is essential for some kids who don’t feel safe talking to their parents about their sexuality.

My 12 year old has already witnessed that among her friends – parents who ignore their kids' reality and try to force straightness on them. Or parents who say offensive things about gay or trans people which makes their gay or trans kids retreat even further and not feel safe around their parents.

So removing this access will absolutely harm kids. It will likely lead to kids attempting suicide. Some will succeed.

Unfortunately, this administration isn’t stopping at eliminating suicide prevention hotlines and mental health support. The felon-in-charge also decided that LGBTQ+ kids shouldn’t feel safe or welcome in their schools by creating an executive order that removes the protections for LGBTQ+ youth in federally funded educational facilities with actions like banning schools from respecting the identities of trans and gender non-conforming students, blocking them from using the correct restroom or participating in athletics, and forcing schools to out a student to parents if the student requests to be referred to with a different name or pronoun.

Even things that might seem “small” like removing books featuring LGBTQ+ characters from schools and individual class libraries will impact the sense of safety and support that LGBTQ+ kids feel.

All of this erases the identities and lived experiences of LGBTQ+ youth and puts them in potentially unsafe situations in a place that should be safe for them.

It also pits students against teachers and puts teachers in the position of protecting a student or potentially losing their job.

And while so much of how this is enforced is determined by the school district, the teachers, and the politics within the state or city, it still puts kids at risk for harm.

My daughter has already experienced this first hand when we lived in a small conservative town within a liberal state. She had a teacher who refused to teach the reproductive system because she didn’t believe it was appropriate for kids to learn about — it wasn’t even sex ed. It was “this is what a uterus is,” so basic anatomy. And that same teacher wouldn’t let my kid wear her pride pins in class.

My daughter’s 5th grade teacher confiscated and threw away every pride sticker or pin she wore to school and told her to stop wearing the pride t-shirt she had made for herself (she refused).

Contrast that with the school she currently attends where there are pride flags in the hallway and the counselors office. Where it’s made clear to all kids that they don’t need to hide who they are – at least not to their teachers.

The thing is, all kids deserve the right to feel safe in school. All kids deserve the right to exist as they are, not as the government prefers them to be.

My kid knows this in her bones.

We move frequently since we’re a military family. The idea of leaving this school district to go to one that would likely be more restrictive and less supportive is scary to my daughter.

Just before my kid got out of the car, I remembered that this administration is already responsible for the deaths of 2 young children. Not at the hands of other children, wielding spears or arrows, but as a result of medical misinformation and a lack of trust in science – courtesy of the man who is now in charge of the Department of Health and Human services.

2 young kids died of measles, a highly contagious and vaccine-preventable disease. RFK Jr, once a prominent advocate for cleaner water and air, has gone all in on the idea that vaccines are not helping our kids avoid nasty, harmful, infectious diseases and instead causing autism. None of my 3, fully-vaccinated kids are autistic. But ok.

Rather than stating that the MMR vaccine is not only safe but effective in preventing transmission of the disease, RFK Jr said, it’s an okay option — but it’s not the only effective option. Which is categorically untrue.

He didn’t encourage parents to vaccinate their kids.

Instead, he posed for tacky photo ops with grieving parents who were actually fine with measles killing one of their kids – who said about their daughter, “It was her time on Earth,” and that their other children survived measles, so it’s really not as bad as the media is making it out to be.

I did not tell that part to my daughter. I could not even imagine saying that about one of my children. And while I’m not inclined to judge other mothers, I wonder how deeply indoctrinated in a religion and a lifestyle you’d have to be in order to be fairly dismissive about your child’s preventable death.

And while the measles outbreak has quieted somewhat, RFK Jr has set the wheels in motion to make the next outbreak of whatever infectious disease or virus even worse. He recently installed 11 new advisors for ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices), the panel of medical professionals who advise the CDC on vaccination practices. No big surprise that all are anti-vax or “vaccine skeptics.” So that’s great.

This panel has an enormous amount of power and their recommendations will impact the health of children and adults across the country. The more they sow distrust of vaccines, the more people will get sick and possibly die. Kids are particularly vulnerable, in part because they don’t get to make these choices themselves. But also because there are certain illnesses and diseases that kids are more susceptible to – and these are the ones we typically vaccinate them against.

RFK Jr and his devotees believe that a healthy lifestyle and good nutrition are the “best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses."

This, of course, ignores the science that says otherwise. Science that tells us that vaccines are a safe and effective method for preventing infectious disease. That chronic illness is not exclusively caused by an “unhealthy diet or poor lifestyle choices” but often by things out of our control like our genetics, our socio economic status, our education level, and the environment we grew up in or currently live in.

These social determinants of health actually have a lot more to do with our overall health than the food we eat and how much we workout or what unregulated supplements we take.

If RFK Jr really wanted to make a difference in kids' health, maybe he could go back to advocating for cleaner water and air. But he’s not.

Instead, the current administration is rolling back environmental protections that, if you read the Hunger Games, could lead to creating the exact landscape that caused the formation of Panem. Receding coastlines and entire parts of the country submerged under water. The earth ravaged by excessive mining of resources and entire forests destroyed. An utterly unlivable climate in most places. Most people living with nothing while the privileged few reap the benefits of the work of the larger, poor, devastated population in the districts.

RFK Jr could prevent the many deaths that could result from this future. But it appears he’s more interested in chasing the scourge of autism, which incidentally, isn’t as deadly as polluted water or air.

***

At the end of this rapid fire 5 minute tirade, I pulled up to the theater where my daughter was performing later that day – her summer camp is a theater camp. She looked shellshocked. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of, “that’s bad, mama. What do we do? How do we stop this? I don’t want to live in the Hunger Games?”

Sigh….I don’t either, kid.

I don’t have an easy answer. And I told her that. It’s hard because we are up against a machine that doesn’t actually care about kids, regardless of what they might say.

The best thing we can do is ACT — like Katniss did (although I didn’t think to make that comparison in the car). And we can let our humanity win, also like Katniss. The way we do it might be different, but the energy is the same.

We can speak up against the injustices we see. We can speak up for those who are marginalized and use our privilege when we have it. We can march and protest publicly, particularly in larger groups and show that more of us want goodness, kindness, safety, and health. We can relentlessly call our members of congress and tell them to do their jobs. We can speak out about this loudly on social media or with friends. We can choose not to normalize this and continue to rally against people who want this to be the new world order.

And while I didn’t have the presence of mind to say this to her in those last, brief moments in the car, we don’t let them steal our joy.

Like Peeta, we refuse to let them change who we are.

My daughter looked at me and sighed the most world weary, 12 year old sigh. “Ok, mom. I’ll try. Let’s do it.”

*****

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