Equality In Harrison Bergeron

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In every society there is a large number of rules and laws that people operate under. For example, in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron”, the idea of equality is understood in a very literal manner. The way the government handles making everyone equal shows that they do not have a valid understanding of equality. They feel as if nobody should be better than the next person and everyone should literally be the exact same. They issue out handicaps to anyone with any understanding attributes to make everyone equal. In Vonnegut’s short story, he depicts how the governments idea of equality is understood in a very literal manner. It was decided in their 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution that everyone. They took …show more content…

The government in Vonnegut’s story impairs their civilians by blocking their freedom to live as themselves. In this story one of the main characters, Harrison, decides to disobey the laws by stripping away his handicaps and dancing with his new Empress. As soon as this happens, the Handicapper General comes in and shuts everything down. “It was then that Diana Mood Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double barreled ten-gauge shotgun, she fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.” Paine also differentiates between natural rights and civil rights in the selection. “Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.” (465) “That every civil right grows out of a natural right; or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged.” (Paine 465) In least difficult terms, the contrast between a human and common right is the reason you have them. Human rights emerge essentially by being a person. Social equality, then again, emerge just by goodness of a legitimate allow of that right, for example, the rights granted on American natives by the U.S.