The Privileged and Powerful Few
When people in the powerful group have everything, the people who are not in that group have nothing. It is unfair when certain people have all the power and others have none.
"Days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitute for the Capitol version. What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of the button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, those people in Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?"
In Africa most families are really poor. They don't have enough food to eat, bad shelter and no clean water to drink. Sometimes the kids in Africa don't even live over 5 years old. Now, many Africans are dying of AIDS (HIV), even children and babies. If they have houses, they are small and made of cement with one room and no beds. Africa is a country of poverty like District 12.
There are a few wealthy people in Africa who take everything for themselves. They have a lot of food to eat and live in beautiful houses. The richest of those people are foreigners. The wealthy parts of the cities look just like the Capitol. Some African countries are ruled by military rebel armies who take most of the aid packages of rice and other supplies for themselves dropped down from planes by wealthy countries.
"The Career Tributes tend to gather rowdily around one table, as if to prove their superiority, that they have no fear of one another and consider the rest of us beneath notice."
Some popular kids in high school think they are superior to everyone else. The other people feel left out. The Career Tributes act as if they are better than the kids from the other districts.
"They do surgery in the Capitol, to make people appear younger and thinner. In District 12, looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early... A plump person is envied because they aren't scraping by like the majority of us. But here it is different. Wrinkles aren't desirable. A round belly isn't a sign of success."
Hollywood makes people want to look thinner and more beautiful. Many people try to copy them and do things like plastic surgery and dieting all the time. People in the Capitol are just like the people in Hollywood who want to look glamorous.
People who don't have enough money can't make themselves look good all the time, like in the case of Katniss. But Katniss actually looks better and more natural than people in the Capitol.
"The cameras haven't lied about its grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal. All the colours seem artificial, the pink's too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes, like the flat round discs of hard candy we can never afford to buy at the tiny sweet shop in District 12."
When I play video games, I feel like I am in an artificial world where everything looks weird and colourful. But when you come out of the video game into reality, it is like being in District 12 where you can't even afford a candy.