The vision of 1984

The thing I like most about George Orwell's 1984 is his vision of that time. He wrote it before that time around 1945 and although probably hyperbolic, his novel is probably what he envisioned the year 1984 to be like in Britain. I asked my mum the other day about what she thought the year 2000 would be like when she was growing up. She said "Oh. I thought there would be flying cars, a cure for every disease, but more of a broken world, more of a dystopia." So it seems quite a few people think and thought the future would be grim. There are no flying cars, there is no big brother, no double speak, or thought police. Yet, tone it down a notch, we have planes, CCTV cameras watching our every move, contradictions and lies, and our education which all seem to be connected to these crazed ideas others had of the future. I like the future. It's so interesting and so full of things and anatomies that we have no idea exist yet and to think that all of this carries on long after we’re gone. Did cavemen ever think that we would progress so much as a species when they were alive, you know, they probably didn’t even know what a species was!

We think that right now we have everything we need, nothing could makes our lives more satisfactory aside from that robot servant to bring us cocktails all evening and the self cleansing floor we’ve always needed of course. But I remember a time when hardly anyone had an Internet connection in their own home, now a lot of us can’t even imagine how we would survive without that amenity. What is it we won’t be able to live without in the future?

The future is also interesting because we are at a constant debate to whether life is predetermined or whether things happen in due course and you have complete self-control and freewill. It might be a thing we will never know, but we don’t know what the future holds.

So whilst you sit and ponder about what is going to happen one minute from now, I will have already have experienced how this writing has affected what I am going to do next. Spooky stuff.

So this whole government thing: I don’t think anyone knows what is really happening anymore. No one got the most amount of votes, so instead of someone walking straight into number 10, we don’t really have a ‘proper’ Prime Minster at the moment. Gordon Brown seems to have resigned; The Liberal Democrats are trying to negotiate deals with the Conservatives and Labour. No one really knows what is going to happen, it’s basically up to Nick Clegg and I don’t think it will last very long no matter what happens before they decide to do a re-vote. I’d quite like this in a year’s time. So I can vote please? What I want to happen? Not a coalition, not a Tory government.

Edit: So a Lib Dem/ Tory coalition did happen. Not the best news and I don't understand how these two parties can work with each other due to highly differing views. But we'll see. I am sad to see Gordon Brown go, but what can we do. I think he probably made the right choice. He was hated by the majority.