Warning Myself About the Orwellian Future

From my primary "I Protest" Substack (July 2022) at donaldjeffries.substack.com

When I was a kid, in the 1960s, I loved watching those futuristic specials on the Wonderful World of Disney. My family was never going to visit any futuristic World Fairs, let alone Disneyland, so that’s as close as I could get. The future looked amazing. And I really loved those flying bubble cars from The Jetsons.

There were fantastic predictions of humans living on the moon, or Mars. Scientists forecast great increases in human lifespans. Disease would be basically eradicated by all the technological progress. I already knew about things like Thomas Edison’s machine that could talk to the dead, and wondered what happened to it. I still wonder about that. I guess his research went down the memory hole with Nikola Tesla’s papers, after uncle John Trump confiscated it for the government. Or Wilhelm Reich’s work, which the FDA took while he was unjustly imprisoned.

One of my favorite literary themes has always been time travel. As a young child, I gravitated to books that touched upon this. Danger: Dinosaurs. The Time Garden. Danny Dunn and the Time Machine. There were lots more. The idea of going back in time and observing what really happened at any given moment still excites my imagination. I know it seems impossible, but then I look at that kid in the photo taken during Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which Jesse Ventura delved into on his old Conspiracy Theory show, and I think; maybe, just maybe, it is possible.

So I picture my present aging self, somehow teleporting back to say 1967, the year I won a Little League batting title and got the game winning hit in the championship game. Maybe I would tell my parents, and my siblings, “Hey, you might want to come to this particular game. You’ll see me carried off the field. I think you’ll feel proud.” Well, not actually carried, since I was far too fat for them to manage that. They tried, though. I was a very rare obese kid, before it became so popular. And an even more unusual breed of obese athlete. I was really great at sports. It helped stop the bullying.

But I’ve gotten sidetracked. Those of you who listen to my “I Protest” show know that I tend to do that. So, I’d try to explain to little Donnie (that’s what my family called me) that the future wasn’t going to be what the scientific prognosticators claimed. First, I’d make him feel good by saying, “While you’ll never be a Major League Baseball player, you will achieve your other big dream,” and then tell him about all my published books. The ones he’d write some day. I’d tell him that he’ll have kids- another big dream of mine. I always wanted to be a father.

But I’d advise him not to buy into the propaganda that it’s “expensive” to have children, and thus to limit yourself to only two. I regret not having a bunch of kids, and if it were possible to change things, I would do it. Then I’d try to gently explain to him just how different the future was going to be, than how it must have looked in his eleven year old, perpetually daydreaming mind. First of all, those flying Jetsons bubble cars? Nowhere in sight. NASA claimed to have this technology, which they used in the early ‘70s to magically fit the lunar rover into that tiny space capsule, but it hasn’t been seen since. I was a real astronomy fanatic as a child. I’d try to break it to him gently about the bogus space program.

I’d tell him how cool the internet is, and flat screen TVs, and how he’d have such a love affair with the video recorder from the late 1970s well into the 1990s. But then I’m thinking at this point, little Donnie is too young to understand much of this. Why not flash forward to 1974? My teenage mind was just beginning to truly rebel. so I’d tell him, “Don’t be scared to ask Twyla Turner to the prom.” But doesn’t that bring the whole Butterfly Effect into play? A new relationship could possibly have impacted my entire future. So, no, I don’t want to jeopardize that. I’d tell him to enjoy the girl watching while you can. The future is full of tattoos, obesity, and multi-colored hair.

I’d have to break it to him that he wasn’t going to be the next Bob Dylan. That his songs will be liked by various girls, but ultimately he’ll put down the guitar, but never give up on the dream. Eventually, you’ll have six books published. Well, as of now. I’m getting ready to send the seventh to the publisher, and am working on an eighth. I realize I’m forgetting the broader lessons here, and concentrating on my personal timeline. And so I eventually scrap the whole fantasy in my mind. You can’t go back, and if you could, and changed things, you probably wouldn’t be happy.

But for the sake of this article, let’s say I sat the young adult version of myself down, and told him just how right he was about all the things he was beginning to suspect. The world is run by impossibly evil beings. Wait until 2020 or so- when they come out of the shadows. You won’t believe it. All these things you’re starting to rant about, to family, friends, and fellow workers, will one day be ranted about by millions. But you’ll still be outnumbered, and everyone in power will disagree with you.

The great scientific “advancements” of your lifetime will result in wildly increased rates of childhood cancer, a decreasing life expectancy rate, and by 2022, the brink of water and food shortages, rolling power blackouts, people wearing masks to protect them from a contrived “virus,” massive violations of civil liberties, and a “political correctness” that has culminated in it being a Thought Crime to say “man” or “woman,” or to not call someone by their “proper pronouns,” which often are “They” for an individual, or to deny that men can give birth to babies.

I’d have to tell my young self about the culture. The music is horrible in 2022! Do they even have singer-songwriters, what I wanted to be, any more? The films are full of the worst propaganda, they whisper the dialogue, and light the sets so you can’t see night scenes. Most of them end, and you have to go online and try to find out what happened. They are that indecipherable. And if I was complaining about the quality of play, and the outrageous salaries in professional sports then, just wait until 2022. You’ll seriously think that, at age sixty five, you could do a better job.

Or I can just picture myself as a time traveler, without the ability to interact with my past self, or anyone else. I’d see my idealistic young self, about eighteen years old, enthusiastically planning a talk by Mark Lane at my local library. As the head of my local chapter of Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry, I was proud of booking their conference room, so the world could know the truth about the JFK assassination. But a freak April snow storm cancelled the event, and when it was rescheduled, it was Lane’s top aide Joe Secchio (always wondered what happened to him), that did the presentation. And I was very disappointed in the small turnout, which included one of my sisters and a handful of strangers.

Or the time in the 1990s, when I had a heated argument at a cookout with some of my brother-in-law’s know-it-all friends, about NAFTA, which had just been signed by Bill Clinton. These guys all had Masters degrees, and here I was, a community college dropout working a blue-collar job while I continued to dream, write on the side, and pontificate about everything. But I’d take some solace in knowing just how right I was, and how wrong those arrogant, “educated” guys were.

Those of us who’ve lived a life of going against the grain, of speaking up in meetings without anyone backing you up, of writing letters to congressmen, television stations, newspapers, and magazines, know what I’m talking about. I wrote songs and poems about the tyranny and corruption then, some forty five years ago. I had to gradually introduce my radicalism to my girlfriends. Only a few had any interest at all. Most were repelled. I didn’t care what my male friends thought. I knew the Firesign Theater was right in saying, “Everything you know is wrong.”

The bumper sticker on my first car, a beat up 1970 Datsun 510 sedan, which read, “Who Killed JFK?” advertised where I was already at. If Alex Jones had been selling tee shirts then, you know I would have been wearing them. I was so excited when Penn Jones put my very first published article on the front page of his newsletter The Continuing Inquiry. No one in my family was excited. I couldn’t even get them to read that article, so it’s no wonder none of them read my books. Or admit to it.

Would I have advised my young self to stop reading JFK assassination and UFO books, and get serious about college? To try and actually make some money, and build a future? I don’t know; sure I’d be more financially secure now, but I’m doing okay. And I wouldn’t be able to look at my name on multiple covers, something I dreamed about constantly as a child, reading all those books about magic, and time travel, and American History, and sports. I could never trade the excitement of strangers all over the world reading my words, or listening to my voice, for a bigger net worth and a collective slap on the back from “normies.”

But it is surreal to realize we’ve reached the point I talked about so much back then. The future that is so similar to Orwell’s Oceana. Except it’s injected with increasingly mad identity politics. They’re still lying and insisting Oswald did it. I couldn’t have envisioned the even more ridiculous 19 crazed Arabs scenario of 9/11. And certainly not a worldwide shutdown because of an invisible disease that shatters the “science” of all previous viruses in history.

I spent my forty four years in the workforce openly saying the kind of things I say on Substack. Always courting controversy. Not for attention, but because it’s my nature. I don’t try to be contrarian just for the sake of it. But we’re being lied to all the time. About everything. It’s just hard to stomach how many good people keep accepting the lies. It reminds me of all the sweet girls I’ve known who stayed with nasty ogres and tried to “change” them. You just shake your head at those girls. And the incredibly gullible and subservient public at large. The elite aren’t going to “change” either.

I’ve never been good at holding my tongue. I could relate to that Twilight Zone episode where the loudmouth guy makes a big bet that he can keep silent for a year. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen the episode, but it features a typical Rod Serling ending with a twist. I love to talk. I hate being alone, but if I am by myself, invariably I talk to myself. I admit it. In class, in meetings, I was always the first one to raise my hand, with a question or a comment. It never impressed those I was questioning. Like the old country song says, I’ve always had friends in low places.

As I say often, we didn’t arrive at this point by accident. There were plentiful warning signs, and some of us tried to point them out. Very few listened. A lot more are listening now, but not nearly enough. And individually, we don’t get to where we are by accident. I was a rebel at a young age, and nothing that happened in society, or in my own life, dissuaded me from becoming ever more radical. Sure, ignorance is bliss, but I cringe at picturing myself with a mask on, counting my investments.

I’ve never been an “I told you so” kind of guy. But at this point, I mean, come on. Those that didn’t listen to the few of us forty years ago who were exposing things, and aren’t listening now to the thousands of awake podcast hosts and bloggers, owe us all a big apology. A really, really big one. But by the time they finally wake up, we may all be in the FEMA camps, fighting over our rationed provisions. I wonder how many bathrooms those places have? Will we all be channeling our inner Oliver Twist?

I still have the time machine fantasy. Like I’m going to be able to build one. It’s some kind of thrill to think of observing things behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll, or walking the dark streets of London’s east side in the summer of 1888. That’s the main reason that, even if the technology were possible, they would never permit time travel. In and of itself, that would expose all their historical lies. And the past lies would lead inexorably to present lies. As we all know, there are a lot of them.

It’s best that we leave our past selves be. I made a lot of mistakes, but wound up in a pretty good position. But if there were a way to travel back (and I think I’m not alone in only wanting to visit the past- the future is terrifying), I’d be the first in line. Not to stop anything from happening, or cause anything to happen, but to satisfy my curiosity. And to potentially prove with absolutely certainty the truth about all the events I write and talk so much about.

No one in America 1.0, least of all my own younger self, would believe that we allowed America 2.0 to be built. To have permitted the worst monsters on earth to rule over us. That free speech, and freedom of assembly, would be crushed. That fifty seven genders and transgender story hour would flourish. Own up to it. Admit that you swallowed the most ridiculous narratives ever written. Apologize before we are relegated to having to say, “I told you so.”