Compare And Contrast The Pedestrian And Harrison Bergeron

How a Dystopian Society Can Be Created
Can we be equal? Is technology good? What causes rebellion? In short stories “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut we will see the answers to those questions. In both stories the people in power focus on the wrong things and it ends up hurting their citizens. The people in both worlds rely on technology to do very important jobs and this reliance causes the societies to misuse their technology. When people feel as if their freedoms are being restricted, they will rebel. In “Harrison Bergeron” and “The Pedestrian”, the controlling government, dependency and misuse of technology and the significant rebellious acts caused by these things create a dystopian world for its

In “The Pedestrian”, the government controlled police car stopped a man called Leonard Mead who was just out for a nightly walk, one that he’d been doing every night for years. The car even threatened to shoot if he didn’t stop, then talked with Mr. Mead and eventually arrested him. When the police car pulled up to stop Mr. Mead, it called “‘Your hands up or we’ll shoot!’” (Bradbury, 1). When the police car was trying to get Mr.Mead into the back of the car after he’d been arrested, it said “‘Get in’” (Bradbury, 2). It is highly unlikely that a man out for an evening stroll, in a city of 3 million people, is the police cars best interest. The government sees a walk as something unusual and in that world it is, but Mr. Mead was not a threat yet he was still stopped and arrested. The government’s focus should not be stopping people who are doing something out of the ordinary but it should be on using it’s resources to stop real crime. In “Harrison Bergeron” the government wanted to make their people completely equal and their society free of the worries of competition. The government decided to use handicaps to make everyone equal in every single way. They introduced mental handicaps to put everyone on the same intellectual level, physical strength handicaps to make everyone as strong as the next, physical beauty handicaps so that no one had an advantage because of beauty. George describes the ballerinas on TV as “Good - no better than anyone else would’ve been” (Vonnegut, 1). George also describes Hazel’s hypothetical skills as handicapper general as “‘Good as anybody else’” (Vonnegut, 2). When this society handicapped things like thoughts, physical ability and other things like that, they take away that individuals ability to be creative and to prosper in life. This is not only going to