Tired of arguing with friends and family who don’t believe science or the authorities, and who wonder out loud if the pandemic is fueled by propaganda?

There’s a simple solution – The Hunger Games. I find it helps to think about the world right now like we’re writing a university essay for English 101. We can start by figuring out what genre we’re in, and that’s where the Hunger Games is useful. Does our life in Canada currently resemble a dystopia – yes or no? Let’s break that down a bit further.

First, what did you eat today? Did you catch, hunt or harvest anything? Did you purify rainwater from a modified steel drum to make hand-ground chicory coffee? If preparing your food took less than two-thirds of your day and didn’t include bartering, we’re not in a dystopia (though it could be a cookbook).

Second, how are you reading this? Is it scratched onto recycled cardboard and stitched together in booklet format with strips of dried deer hide? Did anyone die heroically in the process of bringing you these words? If you have access to glowing screens of endless data, you’re clearly not in District 12. Life is not dystopic.

Third – most crucially – if “none of this is true,” who’s saying that it is – and why? Who’s pulling the puppet strings, so to speak? Who is really running things? This is very important. There are essentially two options: it’s people with our best interests in mind…or the opposite. (Hint: in dystopias, it’s always the opposite.)

If you clear away the rubble of unpopular rules and confusing research – what’s left? Is it regular people trying to do their best, or Machiavellian President Snow-style despots? Here’s another clue: No tyrant worth his salt would let us go about our daily lives with such miniscule modifications as wearing a mask and would you please consider getting a vaccine. That’s not how the apocalypse rolls out.

If anyone thinks that awful things are happening behind the scenes and it’s only by sheer luck or some happy glitch in the system that we can still communicate on world-wide media platforms using readily available electricity to discuss those awful things over pumpkin spice lattes, well, maybe check out some more science fiction. That’s not typically how the end times play out, either.

Here’s my point: if a horrible, extremely contagious disease like COVID was deliberate, as people I know personally are saying, we’d be in a hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth landscape by now without running water or (largely) peaceful federal elections.

If every person across the whole globe involved in vaccine development was corrupt, we’d all be dead already except for maybe 75 people in Antarctica in an underground bunker.

If every media outlet in the world was actively suppressing key information, well, then I guess I’d be in on that and hiding my millions in offshore Cayman Island accounts. So there is that.

Even accepting one tiny fraction of one conspiracy theory turns the world into a bleak, bleak place. I refuse to believe that we live in a world that awful.

Instead, I choose to look for goodness. And this is actually not hard, because it’s everywhere! Right now, goodness looks like vaccines and masks and nurses and doctors and scientists and teachers. It’s also my afternoon coffee and working outside on the porch and the real human at a local federal candidate’s office who answered my daughter’s phone call on the second ring.

So tell your loved ones not to entertain even a sliver of misinformation, because that’s the mental equivalent of placing ourselves in the Hunger Games arena. I like dystopic literature as much as the next person, but real life is so much more beautiful with – thank the Lord – less pressure to eat raw rabbit and a way higher chance of happy endings.

Sept. 8, 2021