It's funny.
I've been calling this place I live "1984-ville" and yet not wrote anything about 1984 and why I'm so fascinated by this number. Blame my fixation on this guy.
Read the novel here. It's a fictitious world that's closer to reality than you'd think. All good fiction blur the line between reality and fantasy, I suppose, but the stuff that happens in 1984-ville comes close to Orwell's vision.
Living in 1984-ville means having Big Brother pry into every aspect of your life. Things that violate human decency are passed off as the normal way of life here. Compulsory HIV testing, intolerance of dissent, lack of property rights. Yes, you read correct on the third point. Nobody owns any land in 1984-ville except for Big Brother. Read the Land Acquisition Act (in particular section 5) and weep. However those are not the scary stuff. I can deal with them by making conscious choices of how to live, day-by-day.
The scary thing is that almost everyone in 1984-ville thinks there's nothing wrong with what Big Brother's doing. How do I even communicate ideas with friends who think the best thing to happen was 1984-ville's way of life? A case in point: I was having a chit-chat with friends some time ago about bringing up children in another country (anywhere but 1984-ville) when one of them said to me, "your children might become bums." On another day, he made another statement to me that "I'd rather be a citizen here than of another country where they treat you as 2nd class."
At first I didn't understand what he meant with all those. The realization hit me later, like a freight train gone off the tracks. This friend of mine was so entrenched in 1984-ville mentality that he couldn't envisage any other way of life.
44-hour week with no labour rights is normal. Forcing your own kids to study and becoming myopic (physically and mentally) as a consequence is normal. Companies retrenching local staff in the guise of cost-savings and immediately hiring foreigners with bigger pay and better benefits is normal. Eugenics was once considered a viable way of "upgrading" the intelligence of future generations. Societal acceptance of children with special needs is dismal. Being different is being deviant.
What bugs me? Frogs in the well, that's what.
"...and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed..."
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
July 4, 1776
1 comment:
I used to think that way as well, that living here is really breath-taking (literally, not metaphorically)...
It's antagonizing to know what's really happening behind the Pleasant-Ville life we are leading...
But lately I've been wondering, are we really that helpless and have to force kids to study and be normal? Do we have no other choices but to work 44 hours and not protected?
Well, this notion of helplessness hit me when i started to realize, there isn't really any place elsewhere that we can safely assume to be a better place... rather how we live our live choices and choose a less-of-the-evil?
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