Harrison Bergeron

[driver]

<p>My son was writing an essay for class (and discussing it with me) the other night and I was trying to make a point by drawing on something I had read many years ago. The name escaped me at the time, but I found it again through the magic of the Internet. Hard to believe that this Kurt Vonnegut story is 45 years old. Almost as old as me. Pay attention, kids.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

</p>

<p><a href=“Philosophy | West Valley College”>Philosophy | West Valley College

“That</a> was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.</p>

<p>“Huh?” said George.</p>

<p>“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.</p>

<p>“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.</p>

<p>George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.</p>

<p>Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.</p>

<p>“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.</p>

<p>“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”</p>

<p>“Um,” said George.

“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.</p>

<p>And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.</p>

<p>“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”</p>

<p>A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.</p>

<p>The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.</p>

<p>Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.</p>

<p>And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.</p>

<p>“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

</p>

[dstark]

<p>I prefer David Daniels poem, “1979”.</p>

<p>“Though every breath of life is a magical will on our earth”</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/years.htm[/url]”>http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/years.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;