Harrison Bergeron Equality

It is the year 2081 in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” and society forces equality on America in the areas of beauty, strength, and intelligence through the use of mandated physical and mental handicaps. Vonnegut creates a world in which beautiful people are required to wear masks to cover their faces and strong individuals are forced to carry weights to make them equal to the weaker population by the government. For the intelligent men and women, headsets that blast random noises are worn to interfere with critical thinking and individuality. These handicaps are mandated by the government to be worn at all times, enforced by law to equalize all human beings. The protagonist in this short story, fourteen-year-old Harrison

Bergeron, is very handsome, strong, and intelligent, and thus is required to wear an abnormally large headset, gigantic scraps of metal along with pounds of birdshot, large glasses, and a red rubber nose just to offset his features. As George and Hazel Bergeron watch television, they see their son, Harrison, who has just escaped from jail. He was taken from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, and jailed because he was deemed a threat to society; his only crime being that he was different. He appears on the screen in a television studio, throws off his handicaps, and declares that he is the Emperor, taking a brave ballerina in the studio as his Empress. They begin to dance so gracefully and magnificently, leaping so high that they kiss the ceiling. Suddenly, Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General who mandates the wear of these “handicaps” appears in the studio and shoots Harrison and the ballerina dead with a shotgun. George misses the murder because he is in the kitchen, but his wife has forgotten the reason for her grief by the time he returns.
Kurt Vonnegut’s purpose in “Harrison Bergeron” is very clear. He wants to show that a society that aggrandizes the ill-favored, the stupid, and the mediocre by handicapping those with talent, intellect, beauty, and strength can never benefit those with natural disabilities. In this dystopian society where individual freedom and expression is sacrificed for conformity and perceived social harmony, the danger of total equality is the central theme; whether or not the surrender of true happiness, freedom and personal accomplishment and fulfillment is worth all being "equal [in] every which way” (Vonnegut, 1). Vonnegut seems to believe that it isn’t at all -- that total equality is not a paragon, worth striving for (as many people believe), but an erroneous objective that is hazardous in the implementation as well as the aftereffect. For most, decency dictates that society aids people with disabilities supplementary help in their aspirations, wanting to be more than just the appendages of our innovative society. However, it is the abnormal and extraordinary people who upgrade society—the nonconformists, the dreamers, the renegades. The lack of individuality and innovation in Vonnegut’s society will inevitably lead to the collapse of civilization. It is appropriate to legislate equality before the law in the areas of education, employment, and justice. However, Vonnegut forewarns through this story that too often people conclude that equality means being the same, a simply not realistic ideal. Conformity for its own sake can be a terrifying thing, as seen in history by Nazi Germany, whose aim was to rid Europe of people who were abnormal and divergent—Jews, Poles, Czechs, gays, and the mentally and physically disabled.
Don’t know if I should include this: ***Although one may laugh at the insanity and irony of Vonnegut’s story, it can be perceived that he professes that society is already too far down that road already. Because some are ignorant, labels on poison must instruct all users not to drink it and cigarette labels clearly state that they cause cancer while people continue to smoke them. Society has been forced to protect the innocent, but it also must protect the lazy, the stupid, the incompetent, the mediocre, so that no one has to accept responsibility for their actions.***
This theme of total equality is also closely linked to the theme of governmental control. The insistence on total equality seeps into the citizens, who begin to dumb themselves down or hide their special attributes. Some behave this way because they have internalized the government’s goals, and others because they fear that the government will punish them severely if they display any remarkable abilities, George Bergeron being both. This is explained in the text when Hazel instructs George to take out many of the pounds of birdshot attached to his neck to rest it and he expresses his fear of government with “Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” (Vonnegut 3), and how he internalized the government’s goals with “If I tried to get away with it, the other people’d get away with it, and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against each other,” (Vonnegut 3). The outcome of this doomed quest for equality is disastrous. America becomes a land of stupid, slow people. Government officials annihilate the remarkable and the gifted with no fear of retaliation. “Equality” is more or less achieved, but at the cost of freedom, civil rights and individual achievement.
As a theme, freedom remains in the background of the story, shown explicitly when we as readers learn how the gifted are treated and why Harrison escapes from jail. In the story's dystopian society, freedom is no longer a fundamental American value; enforcing the law that makes those who are excellent equal to those who are "normal" in that society has become the prominent social value. Forced equality by handicapping the remarkable people developed gradually as a reply to the diabolized idea of competition (which existed in "the dark ages") in all its attainable formations. Vonnegut indicates that freedom can be taken away relatively easily, since the forced equality in the story has been authorized “due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution,” (Vonnegut 1).
In addition, civil rights are dead in “Harrison Bergeron.” The culture values normality to the point that the citizens in this society welcome overbearing measures by the government in the name of equality.

The irony that exists here is that nobody truly gains from these horribly judged legislative attempts to force equality on people apart from possibly the inept, like the television announcer who, “like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment,” (Vonnegut, 3). In Hazel Bergeron’s words, the announcer’s inability should be pardoned because his effort is “the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him,” (Vonnegut, 4). Should anyone in that society be daring enough to be above average, he or she is immediately punished, exemplified by Harrison, who is murdered for fighting mediocrity and striving to excel and reach his full potential. By constructing a society with a goal of equality, the consequence being a contorted satire of civilization, Vonnegut hints that civil rights and individuality should never be surrendered and sacrificed, especially not for the so-called common

good.
“Harrison Bergeron”’s form of forced equality tied with governmental control and stolen freedom and civil rights will be questioned by those that are handicapped many times and will undoubtedly eventually fail.

Vonnegut uses Harrison in this short story to display that remarkable people will protest, rebel, and work against the handicaps until this brutal system is abolished. He writes, “Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds,” (Vonnegut, 5). Due to the mandated handicaps that prevent the citizens from becoming their aspirations or reaching their full potential, no competition is permitted. Without competition in any shape or form, there can be no improvement in any area of life. In this dystopia where individual disputes are non-existent because people have stopped competing with each other and cannot think for themselves, the result is a stagnant, deadpan society where universal normality is valued above all else. All innovation that requires individual thought will be halted, all critical thinking will end, and the economy will eventually collapse due to the lack of improvement. Vonnegut’s form of equality where everyone is the same will never succeed in any way because it demoralizes and dispirits the human race and stops all creativity and originality. Vonnegut wrote this story to show readers that all people should not be equal, but rather, individual strengths and weaknesses making

each person uniquely individual should be celebrated. However, his theme of equality can be seen in small ways in our society today, where being nice and giving warm fuzzies are frequently given additional importance rather than encouraging individual success and achievement. We can learn extremely important lessons from Vonnegut's dystopian predictions that can be applied in our own lives today.