When you read The Hunger Games as a pre-teen, you empathize with Katniss, with her battle against her oppressive government.

When you explore the book or even watch Handmaid’s Tale, you are horrified by the inhumane treatment of the characters and you just can’t believe how someone could do something like that. 

When you analyze 1984 for class or for pleasure, you notice the way oppression can shape anger within someone. 

If you read Brave New World, you marvel at how consumerism can infect people and entire societies.

Even as a child reading The Giver for the first time, you know in your heart that Jonas needed to leave.

Animal Farm appalls you with the blatant totalitarianism.

But when you read the news, you stay silent. You can understand the revolution, the fight, the anger when it is inside of fiction. When those stories tie together with a happy ending and some binding, you understand. Because you believe it is fiction, you can grapple with the facts easier. The terrifying thing is that those stories aren’t feeling as much like fiction anymore. As the books we have studied begin to creep in on the reality of our political climate, so many sit back, ready to read the tales based on our times in 30 years and watch as the children of tomorrow are appalled at the atrocities happening now. 

You criticize the Capitol of Panem, but you tune in like clockwork to watch the Met Gala as poverty ravages communities world wide. 

I am by no means telling you not to read or love the “dystopian” fictions on your shelf, but I am simply begging you to consume not only the characters, plot, and world laid out for you, but to digest the message that comes from those texts so that when those pages bleed onto your sidewalks, you are not ignorant.

Wake up.