Porkeysensei
It's Banned Books Week.
Reading changes you. It makes you more of what's best in humanity and it gives you better ideas and understandings than any other activity, bar none.
Don't let someone's outmoded or wrongheaded or simply stupid fear of knowledge and wisdom and empathy flowing from books shut off access to views they don't like. Remember that when you choose silence in the face of censorship, you set the stage for your own views to be silenced.
1984
1984.
A dystopian city lies in ruins in the hands of big brother.
Or is it?
1984, I mean.
Nobody knows the year.
Nobody knows the enemy.
Nobody knows the truth.
You cannot think against the enemy. Because you can turn yourself in.
You are an enemy.
Winston Smith may be the only person living who still thinks like a human. Who still knows that people are capable of thinking their own thoughts. Of remembering their own memories.
But in the land of 1984, thinking is a sin punishable by death.
We believe that freedom is important. The ability to do what we think is right for us should be within our powers and not held by anyone else.
In the land of Oceania, people are held captive not in physical bondages, but through mental and psychological chains. Its broken down atmosphere lies not in the crumbling of the buildings or the bombed-gray areas of poverty stricken neighborhoods, but in the hopeless demeanor and thoughtless acts of a multitude manipulated by a central government that kills your thoughts and makes you live a dead life in accordance to a future that is already told.
It’s a scary thought: to have no thoughts.
Doublethink.
To think that you are not thinking. To think one thing while remembering another. And to stop remembering to think altogether. It’s not as hard as you think. People may already be doing it.
You may already have done it.
Still do.
And still may.
Probably the scariest thing that George Orwell’s novel resembles is the idea that humans can be so easily manipulated to stop generating ideas and be controlled through mass indoctrination. In the guise of saving, it captures. In the idea of preserving, it kills.
And its future probability in actually happening?
None.
‘Cause it’s already in the present.
Brainwashing a person takes time and skill. Brainwashing a society takes only guts and will. People follow what others do in the hopes of being in the right.
Of being the same.
Unknowingly in the wrong.
I have always admired and sought after the amalgamation of thoughts that contradict. Of that gray area in the midst of all the stated rights and stated wrongs.
Read 1984 if you want to be scared for the future, for the present, and for the past.
Read if you want to think and think if you want to save yourself.
Reader's Bill of Rights
1. The right to not read
2. The right to skip pages
3. The right to not finish
4. The right to reread
5. The right to read anything
6. The right to escapism
7. The right to read anywhere
8. The right to browse
9. The right to read out loud
10. The right to not defend your tastes
If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,
Life would be delight,—
But things couldn’t go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn’t be I.
If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I’d be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn’t be you.
If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,—
Yet they’d all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn’t be we"
By e. e. cummings
Source: Hello Poetry