I’m a reader of just about any printed material.  I enjoy fiction, nonfiction, and anything else I can get my hands on.  By far my favorite genre is science fiction and I’ve been reading it religiously since the age of nine.  I love it for a number of reasons but primarily because of its ability to foretell the future.  So many things included in the oldest sci-fi stories have eventually become part of our reality i.e. lasers, satellites, cell phones, and space travel. I then asked myself the question, if sci-fi writers have the ability to see the future so clearly, why not others. The novel 1984 is considered sci-fi by some but to me it’s just social commentary taken to extremes.  But . . . could it be prophetic as well?

I look at the direction of our country today.  It’s slowly sliding toward socialism with people like LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden insinuating their kind of changes into every facet of our lives. In Orwell’s future, the Party is everything and only our service to the Party has any value. Sounds vaguely familiar doesn’t it?

Orwell rewrote the language into something called Newspeak. Changing words to reflect new meanings such as terms like Head Start, Hope and Lifetime Learning Credits, Peace Corp., Americorp and of course Welfare. Newspeak allowed the Party to suddenly change the perception of something just by making the name more palatable.  The “proles” weren’t smart enough to figure that out. Are we?

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING was the mantra of the “proles” in Orwell’s novel.  The “proles” were the regular citizens excluded from the upper echelon of society and needed to be strictly controlled. Could the NSA be the new “Big Brother”? Could Homeland Security be the new “Thought Police”?  You tell me.

Mentioned throughout Orwell’s novel are the following three terms:

• WAR IS PEACE – Doesn’t this clearly describe our current approach to the rest of the world or not?

• FREEDOM IS SLAVERY – Does corroding our civil rights and freedoms under the guise of security explain this?

• IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH – When government transparency becomes just some phony “politically correct” term, does that explain this?

Orwell’s” Ministry of Truth” comes alive when you read this description:

“There were the huge print shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.  There was the tele-programs section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices.” – Sounds a lot like the Main Stream Media and “Fake News” to me.

I could continue these comparisons all day long.  Orwell had the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth and we have the Criminal Justice System. The comparisons were striking to me but will easily be shrugged off by our current government as a gross exaggeration of an old and antiquated novel.  Just like the lasers and communication satellites were written about in the 1940s, at the time they were also considered a gross exaggeration.  I’ve made my decision on where I think were headed as a country and a society.  I’m not saying it’s a certainty but it could become our reality very easily and very quickly.

I’ll admit one thing of Orwell’s that does not translate to our current generation is the “Ministry of Love”.  He thought his “Big Brother” government should mandate copulation and childbirth as a service to the Party as a means of keeping the population levels growing.  I’m sure he never anticipated a government assisted by the courts that would permit the wholesale slaughter of unborn children just to maintain the status quo and keep citizens voting a certain way.

LETS CALL THAT OUR “MINISTRY OF UNLOVE”