A review of 'Harrison Bergeron' by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
This story depicts society in the year 2081, where everybody is equal in every single way. The government, in order to avoid the competitiveness between being better at a certain aspect between people, created mechanisms to limit these 'better qualities'. Potentially beautiful people are forced to wear grotesque masks; strong people are made to carry on huge loads of scrap metal to weaken them; intelligent individuals wore ear radios which produced sounds roughly every twenty seconds to disable them to think too much.
Overall, the story is told from Harrison's parents whilst they're watching television. The plot and characters are not well developed in this, but again, I believe that it wasn't for that purpose which it was written. The whole story (as short as it is) is merely produced to put across it's main idea and moral. The idea being that if society did eventually become equal, everything would be controlled; everything that we think of as beautiful or peaceful in our world would be limited to us and in a way, taken away from us.
The moral of this story, is to show that if someone is better than someone, either it be because of their beauty, intelligence, strength or other ability, that that someone shouldn't be ashamed to show it to others. We should not hide our qualities and abilities in fear that we might cause other people around us to be envious or sad of not having those same qualities. Everyone has a quality and ability that is different from everyone else around them, and just because of this, they shouldn't feel like they need to hide it to keep people from feeling like everything is a competition.
Could you imagine how unfair and strange it would be to have society finally reach equality? Yes, it would solve many problems in today's society, but it would only arise new problems to come.
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