The more things change, the more they stay the same . . . Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), a literary political novel, in the nineteen forties. The cautionary tale was published in 1949; its stated purpose was to warn readers in the West of the dangers of a totalitarian government, i.e., a government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state. The novel is still read and studied today, but apparently has yet to teach those of us who reside in the West much of anything. I’m not sure why this is the case, but a possible answer did occur to me when I heard the pastor at my church quote from Generation to Generation by Edwin Friedman. Friedman, an ordained Jewish Rabbi and a family therapist, wrote: The unmotivated are notoriously impervious to insight. It may be that some of us are in the process of becoming motivated and are beginning to pay closer attention. According to Amazon (June 2013), sales of George Orwell’s 1984 classic novel about the oppressiveness of government overreach and life in a world where there is no place to escape the watchful eye of Big Brother did rise 7000 percent subsequent to Americans learning about the U.S. government surveillance programs (the NSA scandal). Continue reading
