As America beings to look more and more like Oceania, we must ask God how we are to resist the totalitarian thought police of today.

From WORLD. I swung by O’Neill’s for two containers of sour cream and a bottom round roast, which rang up to exactly $19.84. The freckle-faced cashier seemed of high school age, so I asked if she had read Nineteen Eighty-Four. She had not, which isn’t her fault.

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But it might make no difference anyway. Orwell himself knew his warning to the future was probably doomed, hinting his pessimism through protagonist Winston’s secret alcove jottings:

“How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him…

It is the first scenario that materialized: The future turned out to “resemble the present” (that is, a brainwashed citizenry) so that Winston’s warning has no power to appall….

O’Neill’s freckle-faced cashier, even if she were to read Nineteen-Eighty-Four at this point, would think it a nothingburger. She has been well marinated in cancel culture, the forbidding of “offensive” opinions in class, the forbidding of nonmainstream medical views…

The freckle-faced cashier was driven to work today past yard signs with slogans: “Love is love,” “Science is real,” and “Hate has no home here.” She has no idea of the dark meanings assigned them, or historical or literary context to make a connection with fictional Oceania’s “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.”

For those who do see what’s happening in our land, how should we live? … Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Siberian Gulag prisoner, offers this advice to the individual who feels helpless, in words hurriedly penned the day of his arrest on Feb. 12, 1974:

“The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. … It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. … Let us refuse to say that which we do not think….”

How are you praying for free speech and against censorship? Share your thoughts and prayers below.

(Excerpt from WORLD. Photo Credit: Sérgio André on Unsplash)