Senator Bernie Sanders via the Huffington Post
The question is what freedom and liberty mean in the United States of America? What does our constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be?
Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives.
The word ‘Orwellian’ has, in light of Edward Snowden’s recent reveal of the NSA Prism surveillance scandal, become the buzzword on everybody’s mouth.
No surprise that Orwell’s 1949 book, satirising Soviet Russia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, has jumped staggeringly from 13,074 to 193 on Amazon.com. In the past few days the novel has seen a 7000% rocket in sales (!) – not that it will mean much to Orwell himself. And as I speak, the 60th-Anniversary Edition is now 7th on the chart overall, and still rising. Evidently the public are finding the current powers of the US government a bit too close to Orwell’s Big Brother totalitarian future; Prism technology too uncannily paralleled to its dystopian Thought Police counterpart.
People are going back to literature in the search for the answers – whatever they may be – to the senator’s questions, and all the power to them for realising the value of books, of reading.
via the Guardian
literarytaco 
I’m heartened that people are turning to literature to help them understand these issues. Orwell is a start, though I believe Kafka is just as relevant. I wrote more about it here: http://thoughtsatintervals.com/2013/06/17/world-dystopian-literature-day/ . Would love to hear your thoughts.
Best regards,
Andrew