May the Odds be Ever in Their Favor

An engineering lab at Brown University became the site of a tragedy for students who were simply trying to pursue their education on December 13, 2025. Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman from Uzbekistan, who had entered the lab to help a friend study, were shot and killed in an act of senseless gun violence.

Less than a week later, the White House responded—not with urgent calls for legislative reforms to address the issue—but with plans to throw the nation a “spectacular birthday party.”

The announcement of the “Patriot Games,” a four-day-long athletic festival scheduled for the fall of 2026 to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary, was pitched as a tribute to youth excellence, unity, and patriotism. The Trump administration plans to select one young man and one young woman from each state and territory to compete in a televised national spectacle, framing their performances as embodiments of national pride. However, it’s clear that this proposal is nothing but a distraction from the systemic failures plaguing our generation—school shootings, crumbling infrastructure, and a government unwilling to protect its own children. The parallels to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games are impossible to ignore: a nation weaponizing the excellence of its youth to obscure its failure to provide even the most basic protection for its children.

Drawing parallels between the Patriot Games and The Hunger Games is not an overdramatic stretch—it’s a stark reflection of our current political world and its unsettling future direction. In the dystopian world of Panem, the Capitol manipulates public sentiment through the Games, elevating a handful of tributes to glorify a regime that otherwise dehumanizes its people amid poverty and violence. The Patriot Games that Trump proposed also utilize this predatory logic. By casting a select few high school students as the ultimate symbols of national pride, the government is able to engineer a feel-good narrative designed to coexist with—and ultimately gloss over—the reality of collapsing systems such as education and safety.

While the administration searches for arenas to host its grand birthday bash, the nation grapples with an $85 billion annual shortfall in school facility funding. Nearly half of American schools are riddled with structural decay, lead-contaminated water, and outdated infrastructure. Moreover, 40 percent lack modern ventilation systems or generally safe learning environments. The money funneled into this extravagant spectacle could directly address these issues—yet instead of confronting these problems, the government’s proposal of a national pep rally is a deliberate attempt to swap the material needs of millions of children for the symbolic victories of a privileged few.

This contrast is especially jarring given the reality of gun violence that remains rampant in schools across the country. While the Trump administration hunts down one young man and one young woman to embody this nation’s sense of pride and unity, we’ve already lost one young woman and one young man—Cook and Umurzokov—to gun violence that continues to devastate thousands of families across the country. The rate of school shootings has nearly tripled, skyrocketing from 19 per 100,000 in 1999-2004 to 51 in 2020-2024. In the absence of meaningful reform, classrooms have turned into violent spaces where safety is no longer guaranteed for our nation’s children. A celebration exploiting the talent of American students is insensitive when the basic rights of safety and education are frequently denied to them.

At its core, the Patriot Games exposes the one-sided social contract being forced upon America’s youth. On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order dismantling the Department of Education, a decision that jeopardizes federal oversight for civil rights regulations and campus safety policies like the Clery Act, which requires schools to have transparent crime statistics. There’s bitter irony in asking young people for their grit, sweat, and patriotism on a national stage, while refusing to fund mental health services, enact gun reforms, or maintain the basic infrastructure needed to survive—let alone thrive.

This hypocrisy doesn’t just stop at America’s borders; it echoes a deeper sense of apathy that silently condones violence both domestically and abroad. In late December, a 60 Minutes segment titled “Inside CECOT” was abruptly pulled just hours before it was supposed to air. The episode exposed the inhumane conditions in El Salvador’s mega-prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrants, including young students, who now endure torture and abuse. This same pattern of suppression and disregard for human life extends internationally as well. In Gaza, Israeli airstrikes—often carried out with American-made munitions—have completely destroyed schools and hospitals, killing children in patterns that eerily mirror the Capitol’s ruthless bombings to enforce “order” in The Hunger Games.

This same administration is now enthusiastically urging us to wave American flags and to become excited to celebrate a national birthday party. When the suffering of hundreds of youth in detention centers or war zones are censored to preserve political calm, the pageantry of an athletic event becomes little more than a gag order draped in red, white, and blue. The inescapable reality is that no government can credibly claim to represent its people while actively participating in—or turning a blind eye to—the destruction of the very demographic it pretends to celebrate.

Patriotism is a two-way street. It requires the state to fulfill its obligation to its constituents. It’s unfair to ask the nation’s youth to embody its spirit while refusing to guarantee the safety required for them to grow old and live full lives. This framework transforms patriotism into a hollow, performative gesture—one where students have to prove their worth through spectacle while the government gets to dance around its responsibility to protect them.

Some might disagree and dismiss these concerns, insisting that the Patriot Games are nothing more than a sporting event, like the Olympics—a harmless display of national pride and a chance to bring together a divided country. Even if the games don’t happen, even talking about them with the intention of cultivating inspiration or hope is nothing short of insulting when it’s used as a shield against accountability. The Patriot Games are not a tribute to America’s youth. The odds are never in our favor—just look around.

President Trump might not know how the story he’s simulating ends. In Collins’s world, the spectacle of the Games ultimately collapses because the Capitol can no longer hide the blood with trophies or drown out grief in applause. We shouldn’t have to prove our worth on a national stage to be valued. We need classrooms where that massive $85 billion funding gap is closed and where we don’t have to live in fear, worrying if we’ll even make it to graduation. We need to demand concrete action: support for legislation like universal background checks and red flag laws, funding for institutional reforms our schools desperately need, and continued humanitarian aid for children in war zones like Gaza and Sudan—who may never know peace. Organizations like March for Our Lives and Everytown for Gun Safety offer actionable paths forward for students ready to transform their discontent into tangible change. Until the government addresses the conditions that we are forced to live under, no competition—no matter how grand or “spectacular”—can claim to honor America’s youth.