Everyone Was Not Equal In 'Harrison Bergeron'

933 Words2 Pages

Have you ever wondered what life would be if everyone was equal? Well, in the year 2081, the government made everyone equal with handicaps. In the story “Harrison Bergeron”, the government makes people with special talents or abilities wear handicaps. I agree with the claim,”Everyone was not truly equal in “Harrison Bergeron”. Some reasons why I believe that this statement wasn’t true is that the handicaps don’t take away your abilities, handicaps are not useful, and it is not fair for the people with abilities to wear handicaps. Everyone is truly equal in “Harrison Bergeron” because it made average people and below average people feel equal to the higher and better people. To begin with, the handicaps don’t take your abilities away. According …show more content…

The author states,” Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy.” People could easily take off their handicaps whenever they wanted to. This clearly shows us the reader that the text is telling how easy it is to take off handicaps. But if it is easy to take off handicaps then that means the handicaps in “Harrison Bergeron”, is useless to the people with abilities. They can take off the handicaps whenever they want to but they would have to do it secretly. George has to wear an earpiece which means he could take it out,but he would have to do it secretly when no one associated with the government was watching. Therefore, this makes handicaps useless and a waste of time to make or everyone in this story. As a result, the handicaps in this story is useless for everyone wearing it in the …show more content…

For instance, it says,”Every twenty seconds or so the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantages of their brains.” Also it made people without abilities feel equal. This proves to the reader that it made the people in “Harrison Bergeron” not equal because it was unequal for only people with abilities to wear handicaps and not the average to. Handicaps made people unequal because now people with handicaps have a harder life than the people with no handicaps. They have a more free life rather than walking around with something preventing you to do something that you have developed. Like how George is smart, he must have developed that from studying or doing other academic things. But now he is wearing a handicap to prevent it. This makes it useless for him to think. As a final result, people maybe think that it is equal but overall looking at the story it really isn’t fair because they make people with abilities lives harder than the people with no

Open Document