It was purely by chance that I stumbled upon a copy of Atlas Shrugged at a thrift store while visiting family in the US a while back. Since I’d always wanted to read it, and it was only $2.50, I snatched it up.
I’ve been reading it little by little ever since. The words of the novel rang true in my mind, and they seemed to parallel world events to an extent that was almost disturbing. The villains of the novel seemed to match the persons of Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, John Kerry and others. It’s almost as if these people had modeled their personalities, mannerisms and policies after the worst elements of the “looters” in Atlas Shrugged.
The past couple of months have been a dual existence for me; what I read in Atlas Shrugged is invariably parallelled by world events.
Atlas Shrugged does have flaws. In some ways, it comes across as grossly unrealistic or even childish. The characters don’t seem human. The villains are caricatures of evil. The heroes are like gods; each one of them the embodiment of physical perfection and superhuman abilities. Industrialists, who dedicated their lives to manufacturing, somehow know how to fly planes, are experts in war tactics and martial arts. Their personality traits, at least in the first half of the book, seem absolute, as if they’re more robots than people…
… but it dawned on me that this is by design. They are meant to personify these traits, not necessarily to be convincing human beings. Yet, after a while, I felt emotionally attached to the heroes, and I truly hoped for a happy ending.
Yesterday, I was almost finished with the book, and I realized that there would be a happy ending.
“Alas,” I thought, “if only this election also had a happy ending.” I’m a pessimist, so I was expecting disappointment. I was expecting America to fall to the Communists. It was the same in 2016; I lacked faith in working-class Americans. I didn’t think they had the power to challenge the juggernaut of One-World-Government power. I was wrong then, and I was wrong today.
How appropriate that the happy ending of Atlas Shrugged coincided, at least for me, with the happy ending of the election. Will there be frustrations? Of course there will be, but right now, we should celebrate.
a time to mourn and a time to dance (Ecclesiastes 3:4)
And I’ll conclude with the words of John Galt:
The road is cleared… we are going back to the world
