Comparing The Pedestrian And Harrison Bergeron

Science Fiction is one of the most action packed genre’s out there. Portraying fears and informing people and entertaining people at the same time, no wonder it's a favorite of many. Authors that write these books always put in some type of concept of fear. Fears like advanced technology taking over, fear of war and controlling governments, fear of the unknown and even the fear of space, just to name a few, are the common concepts of Sci-Fi. Science Fiction however always raise a few brows when it's about controversial topics like controlling governments. Many people believe that controlling governments are good but controlling governments are actually very cruel, unfair, and they abuse their power.

Many people believe that controlling governments

are good because they regulate the country’s problems. They believe that these cruel governments are necessary in order to have a more productive any better society. For example, In “2BRO2B”, Dr. Hitz says, “Would you like to go back to the good old days, when the population of the Earth was twenty billion--about to become forty billion, then eighty billion, then one hundred and sixty billion? Without population control, human beings would now be packed on this surface of this old  planet like drupelets on a blackberry! Think of it!”(Vonnegut 8). At this time Mr.Wehling is complaining that he can't keep his triplets due to population control Dr.Hitz is basically saying that without the controlling governments, the society would go crazy and the people would be uncontrollable. Even though this is a good point, it doesn't mean that the government can do anything. An extremely powerful and oppressing government always has rebellions that will will fight back in extreme ways, usually ending in people disobeying laws. A perfect example is when Mr. Wehling, is so frustrated due to the fact that he can't keep his triplets because to population control, that he ends up killing Mr. Hitz, Leora Duncan, and and him self (Vonnegut 9-10). This is a perfect example of extreme measures taken due to controlling governments.
    “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut are  perfect examples that portray cruel and unfair governments.

In “The Pedestrian”, Mr. Leonard Mead, is just walking on the sidewalk when he gets interrogated by the police. In this time period, society is normal by day, but at night no one goes out side. Everyone watches TV and no one has any conversations with anyone. Mr. Mead was the only man on the block without a TV and he wasn't married. Because of these differences, Mr. Mead was “unknown.” The government was scared of him so just because he walked at night, he was taken to The Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies (Bradbury 2). This portrays a cruel government because a innocent man was sent to a research lab all because he was walking at night. This type of treatment is just absurd and the punishment was just unnecessary. In “Harrison Bergeron” Harrison Bergeron is a fourteen-year-old boy who was taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, because he was smart. Just for being smarter, stronger, faster, or even more talented, you would be punished or handicapped. For example, George was very smart so they required him to wear a tiny radio that disrupted his thoughts every now and then. The radio would transmit ear piercing sounds like car crashes or gunshots. Along with the earpieces, talented people like ballerinas had to wear heavy lead balls that are strapped to their waists and taking them off would

result in ridiculous punishments and fees. You had to spend 2 years in prison and you had to pay a fee of two thousand dollars, and that was for each lead ball (Vonnegut 2). This just represents how hard the government tries to keep people equal. Going back to Harrison, along with being taken away at a young age, he was also required to wear many handicaps. Thes handicapped included wearing a red rubber ball for a nose, he had to keep his eyebrows shaved off and he had to fill in his perfect teeth with black caps just so he wouldn't look as handsome. He also wore over 3 hundred pounds of lead balls that made him look like a a moving junkyard (Vonnegut 3). These handicaps were meant for him to look ugly and they limited any superior traits like strength and agility. These are just a few examples of the stories that portray cruel and evil governments. However. controlling governments do not only reside in in fictional stories.
    Two perfect nonfiction articles that represent controlling governments are “North Korean Defector Describes ‘life as hell’ for Christians” by Fox News and “China’s Brutal One-Child Policy” by The NY Times.

In “China’s Brutal One-Child Policy” it basically says that there's a law that a couple can only have 1 child. However, it doesn't stop there. Like all laws, if broken, they can result in punishments or fines. The fine for a second child is 20,000 yuan (about $3,200).If you can't pay the fine, the government punishes you even more. In fact one pregnant woman that was 8 months pregnant was forced to have an abortion in very unsanitary conditions. “Family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and [they] injected a lethal drug into her abdomen.” After the injection, her body ejected the dead fetus and she had to walk home with blood dripping down her legs (NY Times 1). This blatantly describes the way that the Chinese government abuses their power and how their cruel ways of oppression consist of violence, fear, and unnecessary punishments. Another example of controlling governments in today's world is North Korea. North Korea limits the freedom of religion. In “North Korean Defector Describes ‘life as hell’ for Christians” it tells us about a man named Choi Kwanghyuk and how he had to go through many hardships just to worship the religion of their choice. Kwanghyuk was targeted and persecuted because he was Christian. To keep

his beliefs a secret from the government he started a underground church where Christians would go to worship. Kwanghyuk and the others always had to be secretive and stealthy and even then they couldn’t worship loudly or sing their prayers at all (Fox News 1). This shows how people in North Korea have to to through many hardships just to practice a simple right; the freedom of religion. Kwanghyuk was eventually caught and he was sent to North Korea's most brutal labor camp. He was arrested just for practicing one of his excluded rights. In this camp he was tortured a lot. In fact in the text it states, “Prisoners are forced to stand on their toes in tanks filled with water up to their noses for 24 hours, stripped and hanged upside-down while beaten or given the infamous ‘pigeon torture’ —where both hands are chained to a wall at a height of 2 feet, forcing them to crouch for hour at a time.” This quote just show the sheer barbarousness of the government and how they treat their citizens.
Overall, controlling governments are very bad because they are unfair and cruel. They give unnecessary punishments and even though they are sometimes necessary, it doesn’t overway the fact that they abuse their power with that responsibility. Controlling governments usually make the problem worse by taking extrame measure because people that rebel will fight back with the same aggressiveness they were treated with.