For
my choice book I read the Running Man by Stephen King. In the story, which
takes place in the year 2025, a new form of entertainment has arisen that
consists of game shows that people risk their lives in to win huge amounts of
money. The main character Ben Richards has signed up for a game show known as
the running man to win money to help his daughter who is fatally ill. The
running man is a game show in which a person is on the run from an elite group
who is trained to track the contestant down. Throughout the contest the
contestant is portrayed as a criminal to the public to avoid people helping
them. Throughout the book, Ben Richards discovers many secrets that the
government and game association has kept secret from the public, such as
skyrocketing rates of air pollution, and diseases that have resulted from them.
The government continues to do nothing about the pollution and instead allows
people to die from lung diseases to maintain their power.
This reminds me of some parts of our media that discuss things like celebrities and sporting events instead of more important matters. It keeps people from questioning their government’s solutions to problems by distracting them with entertainment. In the book Ben Richards discovers the truth about the pollution problem when he meets Bradley Throckmorton, whose sister suffers from a lung disease caused by the pollution. Bradley has researched the pollution and managed to build a nose filter to protect people’s lungs from the pollution, but when he attempts to spread what he found through Ben Richards, it is suppressed by the games association. Instead the games associations uses his attempt to spread Bradley’s findings to lower public opinion of him even further, which results in the lynching of Ben Richard’s family. At the end of the book, the games association claims to have nothing to do with his families deaths, but I personally think they did so something to intentionally cause their deaths, and even if they did not, they did cause it indirectly by releasing propaganda to the public to make Ben Richards look bad, which caused them to attack his family.
This reminds me of some parts of our media that discuss things like celebrities and sporting events instead of more important matters. It keeps people from questioning their government’s solutions to problems by distracting them with entertainment. In the book Ben Richards discovers the truth about the pollution problem when he meets Bradley Throckmorton, whose sister suffers from a lung disease caused by the pollution. Bradley has researched the pollution and managed to build a nose filter to protect people’s lungs from the pollution, but when he attempts to spread what he found through Ben Richards, it is suppressed by the games association. Instead the games associations uses his attempt to spread Bradley’s findings to lower public opinion of him even further, which results in the lynching of Ben Richard’s family. At the end of the book, the games association claims to have nothing to do with his families deaths, but I personally think they did so something to intentionally cause their deaths, and even if they did not, they did cause it indirectly by releasing propaganda to the public to make Ben Richards look bad, which caused them to attack his family.
No comments:
Post a Comment