WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH: Welcome to 1984

So I started re-reading Nineteen Eighty Four last night. I don’t think it will take that many guesses to figure out why.

I was around thirteen the first time I read it. I was into everything science fiction back then. I remember The Matrix had just put a dent in the universe with its techno-punk kung-fu coolness, Star Wars had just returned to the shores of American pop culture with a not so big, over CGI’ed bang (though to a thirteen year old the pod race scene and its corresponding Nintendo 64 video game were pretty cool) and I had just finished all 720 pages of book three of Tad Williams’ virtual reality opus Otherland.

I was a voracious reader back then, still am for the most part and this is mostly in part to my mother who ever I since I was kid made it a point to take me to a local public library once a week and once we moved backed to Uganda regular trips to Aristoc book shop.

It was on such a visit to a library that the kind librarian;  a rotund Caucasian man with feathery hair graying on the sides and half moon glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose who had keenly sniffed out my love for sci-fi held out a blue covered first edition of George Orwell’s masterpiece. As he proffered it he told me it was the very copy he read when he was my age. I took it from him and turned it over in my hands. I opened the back cover and peeked at George Orwell’s black and white jacket picture. I looked up at the librarian.

“What’s it about?” I asked him in typical youngster fashion.

He smiled.  “Well if I told you, you wouldn’t have to read it now, would you?”

He had a point. I flipped it over in my hands once again. It didn’t look very interesting though.

“Are you sure I’ll like it?” I asked him, still a little skeptical.

“You’ll love it.” He assured me. And so I took it.

And he was right. More than right, I read it three times in one week. It changed my life. The world that Orwell so vividly created; one that was permeated by fear, hate and violence shook me so hard, even at that age, that it had me combing the TV programs, magazines and newspapers I came across for any signs of newspeak for weeks. I constantly racked my own cranium for any signs of double thought for months.

I began spontaneously spouting quotes from the book and started pointing out congruencies between the world around me and the world found in the book. I’m pretty sure I had my mother worried there for a little bit. But of course, as the effects of all such thought provoking works of art must, the effects eventually wore off.

I’ve read the book as well as others like it several more times in the intervening years and every time I’ve read it it’s shaken me out of my apathy, even if for just a little bit. I don’t know what I would do if I had to live in a constant state of righteous anger. I honestly don’t know how people who do possibly do it. In any case, I think the current political atmosphere warrants a little righteous anger. But instead of taking to the streets and walking to electoral commission I will do what I do best, tap away at my keyboard. Who knows, I just might have a Nineteen Eighty Four or a Brave New World in me after all.