Teenagers and their books don’t usually come up on my radar, but there was so much buzz about the revolutionary theme in Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular trilogy “The Hunger Games” that I couldn’t avoid reading the books and seeing the movie about a girl who leads a popular 99% revolt against a greedy, complacent, militarized 1%. As I read, the confrontation-against-government theme never let up, making me wonder if the books and movie might bring even more young people into Occupy to defend their generation against a corporate-controlled government that threatens to wipe out their futures once and for all.

My era of protest is Vietnam, with updated actions against the Iraq war and a revival of community spirit since I joined friends and neighbors on an Occupy march last fall. Among brightly-dressed older folk, teenagers danced around in the parade that encircled the multinational banks in downtown Santa Rosa, California. Many people camped in front of City Hall; some withdrew their funds from big banks in favor of local credit unions; others started an Occupy newspaper and began building toward May 1.

It is no secret that teens between 13 and 18 are devouring the dystopian novels written for them, perhaps because the bleak, ruined landscapes and oppressed people represent the way they feel about their future and the ravaged planet their parents are leaving them. And I wondered if this youngest generation, connected to each other almost since birth by electronic diversions and devices, found anything more socially or politically motivating in The Hunger Games than in other dystopian fantasy fiction. I found the books extremely political but questioned whether they’d mean anything more than entertainment to young people, even as a heroine’s quest to overthrow the rapacious elite who rule Panem—easily recognized as a post-apocalyptic America—might inspire them .

That unpredictable moment when a critical mass of people oppose their leaders, letting nothing stop them as they swell to tsunami-power, is a mystery. Mohammed Bouazizi sacrificing himself in a Tunisian fruit market sparked the Arab Spring that hundreds of thousands of unarmed Egyptians carried into Tahrir Square. Months later, inspired by those events and fed up with corporate control, tents were pitched and Occupy banners waved from New York City to Oakland. These amazing uprisings weren’t on anyone’s map before they happened and flashed around the world. Words and images and music—a proclamation on a wall, a book passed hand to hand, a photograph of a burning child, songs saying enough is enough, that change is “Blowing in the wind” and that “We shall not be moved”—these acts of imagination do change history. In the last two centuries, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Grapes of Wrath” put human faces on slavery and the Depression. Two decades ago, it was rock bands that helped to penetrate the Iron Curtain. Could “The Hunger Games” play a part in Occupy in 2012?

When I Googled Occupy+Hunger Games I saw instantly that I was a late-comer to the discussion. Dozens, if not hundreds of pages lay ahead, big-time posts and ordinary bloggers with opinions from left to right, Christian interpretations of self-sacrifice alongside pagan/environmental/feminist arguments about survival. The rebels’ symbol, a mockingjay in a gold circle pin (not girl-with-bow-and-arrow of the film ads) was being read in different ways as a code piece, like a wafer passed among the initiated. In “The Hunger Games” film—which draws only from the first novel, where resistance is hinted at but unable to unite—rebels in the Districts raise three fingers to show they oppose the Capitol. It looked to me like the V we made with two fingers, for peace, to end the Vietnam war and also like the fist with a rose raised at Occupy sites.

In one post I especially liked, teen idol Penn Badgley observed that police were bashing and hauling away Occupiers attempting to re-enter Zuccotti Park while a short distance away, in Union Square, no one harassed hundreds of kids in their night-long vigil that wove blocks long around the movie theater showing “The Hunger Games.” Badgley expressed no surprise that a marketing phenomenon got a safe pass while New York’s vigilant cops let no political action go unpunished.

Certainly “The Hunger Games,” like Harry Potter and its franchises, are a marketer’s dream: heroes and heroines whose quests and battles have sequels that only grow more popular and profitable. You can buy Katniss Everdeen’s mockingjay pins on Amazon or visit the movie set in North Carolina, where District 12 and the Everdeen home were filmed. While arrests and repression continue against Occupiers in our streets, marketing the revolution on the big screen has gone full steam ahead.

And yet, despite “The Hunger Games” functioning as a huge profit machine, the movie’s opening scene in District 12 is anything but prettified. Starving, beaten-down people cower before Capitol storm troopers (like a cross between Nazis and Star Wars storm troopers) take their children away as sacrifices for the Hunger Games. I was moved by the scene but didn’t know if young audiences would respond to the symbols the way I did, or if the movie was just entertainment, a darker Harry Potter or vampire saga.

To find out, I emailed and spoke with a handful of bright students in my area. The half dozen high school girls I met at Rancho Cotati High School in Rohnert Park, California—a lower to middle income suburb, with mixed ethnic backgrounds—said they said they felt Katniss embodied their ideal of a young woman because she remained true to herself and was loyal to her family and friends. But most startlingly, everyone recognized grim, impoverished Panem as the future of their country.

“America is unjust. We’re exploited, like in Panem,” said one girl. “I won’t be going to college right away even though I have the grades and I should be able to go. My family can’t afford the fees and I’ll have to work.”

The girls had only vaguely heard of Occupy. For them to be drawn to protests, I realized, it would take greater threats to their immediate interests—a foreclosure on their home, rising tuition and the scourge of college debt, immigration crack-downs. If Occupy can connect to those issues, perhaps they’ll come out.

Several students from Analy High School, in more affluent Sebastopol, seemed to be ahead of my questions. One 16-year-old wrote that he thought "The Hunger Games books are a great series that have the potential to change our world for the better in two distinct areas: feminism and political uprisings (such as OWS).” The boy saw that Katniss “worried about the future of her entire people and the lives of millions of innocents…As a teenage boy, I would much rather live in a world where girls are strong and care about more important issues than drama.”

Another boy brought up a major point that’s been mostly antithetical to Occupy. “I think it will take a leader to really spark change…When there is a leader who can stitch together the bloody rent down the middle of our country, there will be, and only then, enough backing, enough power, to force those in charge to do something about the current state that our country is in, or face the combined might of 300,000,000 angry American citizens.”

A 17-year-old girl at Analy wrote: “I read the books while the historic election of 2008 was occurring, Obama began his first year in office, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became increasingly frustrating and unnecessary and the economy plummeted…government and Wall Street created hardships across America, and the movements for freedom and rights began in the Middle East …Katniss's struggle to understand the greater forces at work around her, especially the actions of the government, definitely mirrored my own increased understanding of the world.”

Katniss’s decision to become a public figure, a leader of the revolt, doesn’t happen right away—not until the second book, “Catching Fire,” where she witnesses decadent Capitol citizens gobbling delicacies and then puking them so they can guzzle and swill more. She’s horrified: in her district, the worker-slaves are always starving, always crushed. At that moment, she decides that enough is enough, that her life isn’t worth living unless she fights for the 99%. The closing book of the trilogy, “Morningjay,” completes the cycle of resistance begun in the opening novel: the rebels overthrow the Capitol and rid themselves of their masters, the 1%. But into this otherwise triumphant finale, the author introduces a strange and unexpected twist: Katniss refuses to obey her own leader, a woman she has fought under. Instead of recognizing the end of the Revolution and a new government, Katniss shoots her final arrow into the woman’s heart because she has understood that power has already corrupted leadership.

This final note sounds more like Occupy with its suspicion of media-proclaimed leaders, a point another high school boy understood. “At the end of the war, the rebels contemplate starting a new Hunger Games for all of the children of the Capitol so they won't forget their place. This brutal irony is mirrored in our world over and over again, revolution after revolution…becoming the very things they tried to destroy.”

The bittersweet end of “The Hunger Games” trilogy backs away from politics and governing. Katniss retires at a young age from public life, returning to the desolate District 12 to mourn her losses and reconnect with nature, assured, at least, that the Capitol surveillance cameras will no longer track her down.

Despite its one-size-fits-all symbolism, a kind of allegorical and mythical treasure chest that makes “The Hunger Games” a highly commercial work with broad appeal across gender and culture lines, the main storyline never strays from its mark. Like Katniss Everdeen’s arrows, people young and old keep their target on the 1% that feeds off the lives of all the rest. The message is clear. But whether America’s mass of young readers and viewers stirred by its story will find Occupy and the actions this spring and summer something they can connect with, remains a mystery.