A Letter

Take my words, and I will shout. You can try your very hardest to shut my mouth; strip all the meaning and the nuance from language, condense it down where only one word can represent six, make the complex and lure of literature into simple and efficient machinery. Call it “a beautiful thing, the destruction of words” (Orwell 51). Call my silence necessary. But I will still shout for my love.

Take my wisdom, and I will see. Ban my books; Defund my research, cut down my knowledge and advancement. Kill my professors; silence my students; eliminate even the children whom you have taken already, the "venomously orthodox” (Orwell 48), if you will. Their knowledge is disloyalty. Ban my journals, my outlets, and my art. Mute my vibrato and murder my expression. Blind the literate. Deafen the vocal. Take our time. As you’ve said, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 34). Still, as you will see, hues of sunset pink and red flame will slip through your veils, burning, and I will see the smoke.

Take my freedom, and I will fly. Restrict my bodies, for it is Mr. President who owns me. Enforce my celibacy, for the only love I should have is love for Big Brother. As you said, Mr. President, Medicaid and USAID will only hurt the economy. Give a feast to the stuffed, and wait for it to trickle down to the starving. Install more telescreens. More cameras. You are omniscient. No movement, speech, or text goes unrecorded. Feed our data to the cold metal, who reinforce the monochrome we had fought so hard to colorize. Let that metal decide where the bullet goes, while you drink our blood and eat our meat. Close our borders. Remove those who built our nation and those who held us up. You can tie me down. But you forget about my wings. Tie me down, and I still will soar.

Against your bloody flood, I tread, head barely above the tide. I tread, desperately, but relentlessly. Oh, Big Brother, you add more water, yet still you cannot drown me. Oh, Mr. President, you start more fires, yet still you cannot smite me. I will remain afloat. I will extinguish the flames. I will resist. Did you forget what I am?

Works Cited

Orwell, George. 1984. New American Library, 1981.