Response 8

Graduation is right around the corner and I have to deliver a speech for graduation.  The choices for my speech were either past, present, or future.  I had a while to decide which speech that I chose so I weighed my options.  I could talk about the past and give a brief overview of what has brought us up to this point.  I could talk about the present and where we are in our lives at this point. My last option was to talk about the future and where we would be going with our lives.  I decided to talk about the future.  After reading 1984 my feelings on the past have changed greatly.  Does the past really matter?  In 1984 the past is merely just a creation of the Party.  The past can be rewritten and altered.  The past is of no importance.  What happened yesterday is over and done with.  Nothing that we do now can change what happened yesterday.  What has passed is in the past.  Does it really matter who invented airplanes?  It did not matter to Julia when Winston was talking about the ways of the Party.  It has no direct effect on our lives and it would not change the way that we live now in the present and how we live in the future.  The past is just a collection of memories.  The memories are unique to the individual, but to the whole they are of little importance.  This is why the Party tries so hard to eliminate the individual's memory.  It is crucial to their structure that there be no independent thought and no ideas that exist other than the Party's.  Without memory people cannot know the past.  Because the Party controls the past they also control the present.  The memory holes are very important for the Party because they eliminate the chance of anything existing in the past or present that is not created by the party.  The past is history.