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Censorship In Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

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“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”-Ray Bradbury. Censorship is the act of limiting information, ideas, or the freedom of thought, from life. Censorship can be used because of offensive, sensitive, harmful, or objectionable speech/ideas. In life, censorship is used a lot, more than people think. It also affects lives too. People barely notice it, or care for it, but censorship is there. Censorship has been used for a long time, it has a lot of history. Censorship is found in books, media, or any other form of expression. Censorship is powerful. Everyone should be aware of censorship. Censorship is a theme conveyed in the works of many, such as, I am Very Real by Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison …show more content…

Vonnegut’s excerpt gave a situation where it is the future. In that future, everyone was equal. No one was better, and no one exceeded. From the reading, it states,”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.” It seems that way because in that society, they thought everyone needed to be equal so it would be fair. People are being made equal by beauty, knowledge, and strength, when traits should not be equal. People all are different in their own unique way, so why should anyone take away who they are? The differences make everyone who they are, and that determines how they will live their life, and living a good life, should be done by themselves only. Equality should be given for rights, not anything else. Censorship is being used the unrightful way. In Harrison’s society, what everyone wants, is mistaken. People do not need limitations, to be “equal”. They are meeting equality, but maybe they should try meeting equity. If that happened to the world right now, everyone would not be above, they would be meeting every low traits. If everyone was meeting every low trait, then no one would compete with each other, they would just be the same. Competitions are crucial, it is thrilling, and in life, thrills are a good thing. Thrills give people something to look forward to for the next day, but you can not have competition, if you are all the same. This is why it is important for people to be different, be who they were born to be, but censorship is shown that it will limit anyone, from becoming anything. Also from Harrison Bergeron, there is a conversation with George Bergeron(Harrison’s father), and Hazel Bergeron(Harrison’s

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The story “Harrison Bergeron”, portrays what kind of world the author, Kurt Vonnegut anticipates in the future. He illustrated that people should not try to enforce equality, ultimately because it results in a dystopian society. For instance, by altering beauty, intelligence, strength and weaknesses, the government thinks that people can become more equal. As a result, “Nobody was smarter…better looking…stronger or quicker than anybody else” (Vonnegut 1). It is normal to be born different from others.

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Title In the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, everyone is finally equal in every which way. No one person is stronger, more beautiful, smarter, taller, or is just overall better than someone else. This is all thanks to the current government, who did this using weights, ugly masks, and ear pieces that let loose noises to interrupt a person’s thoughts. One man, named Harrison Bergeron, was recently arrested only to break out a few weeks later.

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He did it in such a way that limited other people, but by using this approach he was able to put everyone on the same level. The philosophy in “Harrison Bergeron” was to to make everyone equal, however our society is corrupt and demands control over the stronger people in order to bring them down. “the minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”(233). This is referring to the limitations on how the society is forced to take control in order to be equal, if we disobey the law we have consequences and society falls apart. “Harrison Bergeron” methods of unfairness shows inequalities towards the control over the persons persona throughout the story.

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Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” In this passage Vonnegut shows how irrational such principals can be and how impossible to achieve absolute equality unless by handicapping the brightest citizens and bringing their abilities down to level of the “average “people. The story mimics the way Americans perceived communism and Soviet Union at that point of history where schools introduced courses to students such as Communism Vs. Americanism in order to wage the propaganda war, this paranoid climate was the result of many factors, one of them is the establishment of a communist government in Cuba by the rebellious Fidel Castro with the support of the USSR .the idea of having a government based on such principles just nine miles away from the US left Americans in a state of panic

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