2016 or 1984

Security Camera.

In the famour book by George Orwell, 1984 there is a society that lives under the eye of a ” big brother”  an omnipresent government surveillance system. When the book was released in 1949, it scared people. The thought of a future, where governments, watch and control their people, would be a horrible society, a restricted society, a society with great loss of freedom and a society that people of that time would shudder at the thought of.

Yet here we are 67 years later and some would say that 1984 has well and truly arrived.

Today we live in a society with conditions, and restrictions, that those first readers of 1984 could never have imagined possible. Sadly in those 67 years our governments have progessively removed our rights and freedoms. The last 15 years have seen a dangerous and scary exceleration of our rights being removed, and replaced by restrictions that could never have been imagined back in 1949.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 gave the governments of the world the greatest excuse to strip people of their freedoms. Today bank transactions are monitored, internet activity is monitored, lists are made of suspected terrorists, people are stopped from travelling to foreign lands just on suspicions of what they might do in those countries, people can be stopped from entering a country just because their names are on the wrong list and on and on and on and on the restrictions go. All this has been under the guise of protecting a country’s people. But who is protecting the people from the governments, from Big Brother.

Sadly no one is protecting the people from their governments. Today governments have greater freedom to take away the people’s rights, and yet seem to have much less oversight themselves. How can it be that we the people have let this happen to us?

If we continue to allow the erosion of our freedoms and our basic rights, we will end up in a society, that is run by power mad politicians, seeking to control every facet of our lives. Surely we cannot willingly let this happen to us. We must not allow these politicians of today, too slowly Corral us into a world that is no better than George Orwell’s 1984 .

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