George Orwell's America Isn T As It Seems

Sophia Han
DeVito
4/21/2016
English 3-4 H
America Isn’t As Perfect As It Seems
On the surface, America is the righteous country helping other nations in need, however, if you dig a little deeper, you will see just how much America matches the dystopian fictions the average high-schooler is required to read. We know little of what is actually happening, but we act on what the media shows us.
George Orwell wrote in his book, 1984, “’You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.’” This statement muttered by O’Brien shows that to be considered sane, one must swallow their pride and conform. Any different

Coming home from the war, veterans are distressed from just how different the reality of war and how the media portrays it as is. (Hedges) If the American public saw everything that the soldiers saw instead of just what the U.S. government and media depicts, would they still sit peacefully at home or volunteer to join the military, or would they protest and cause internal conflict? Shenkman writes that Congress often passes laws that they don’t even read thoroughly because they are rushed to pass them. Throughout the article, Shenkman has been putting up statistics in just how much the American public knows or how many even bother to try to stay up to date. These are the people that will be easily influenced by the government. If the government claims something and backs it up with a few facts and a whole bunch of lies, chances are, the public will not bother to check up on it and support the government’s claims. That may be okay, but if the Congress doesn’t even read thoroughly everything they are signing off on, who is to say that what they are doing is good for the country or even follows the Constitution? Keeping the public, and sometimes even the Congress, ignorant is a great way to keep them united and at peace. “We know more than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do.” (O’Hehir) With Congress being kept in the dark, the government programs can do whatever they feel is necessary in the name of the Constitution without burdening more people of what they do. Since Congress is not burdened by whatever possibly horrific deeds the government programs are committing, they can focus on more important things