The Giver, The Iron Heel, Hunger Games, and dot dot dot

I just saw Jeff Bridges and Lois Lowry on the Colbert Report and listened to them talk about the Giver, the cinematic version of Lowry's wildly popular teen book. I read the book when my daughter Delilah did to see what was popular and I thought it was pretty good post-apocalyptic fiction, and WAY better than Hunger Games or Divergent. I tried both of these. Anyhow the theme in the Giver is that emotion, history, controversy and conflict are bio- and socio-engineered out of existence to ensure harmonious human life. Fair dinkum in terms of sci-fi themes and one of the better presented ones. But the issue I have with these works, and I love this genre, most likely more than any, just have a look at my early 20th century pre-post-ex-whatever-apocalyptic collection, is that they are so heavy handed to miss the truth about what is really going on with mind-numbing media and the current future we are living in. You don't think we are living in the future? Take a look at Star Trek, check out what the communicators are capable of, and recognize that we are post Star Trek. Anyhow, this relates to development and conservation in that so much of our conditioning is to look for the apocalyptic, dramatic examples of disaster and dysfunctionality (sorry, I hate to use "-isms, -ities", etc. but I am too lazy right now to avoid it). The Giver, Hunger Games, etc. are overly dramatic...ebola, drought, resource based conflict (cf. the Middle East), are enough examples of the future that we are starting to encounter. Get involved where you think you can make the change. As bad as you may think things can be, they can also be tremendously better, take a look at this: http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/african-successes-listing-the-success-stories