When young children do a sport, sometimes they’ll have meets. At the meets everyone gets a ribbon saying “participation”. No one wins or loses. Everyone ties. In the short stories “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and “All the Troubles of the World” by Isaac Asimov, both authors create dystopian worlds. The two dystopian worlds can't advance because no regular citizen can be successful and have basic human rights. Humans want to be on top, we will do anything to win, these two short stories create worlds where we can't win, nor lose, only draw; the authors show how crazy the idea of fairness really is.
The short story “Harrison Bergeron” the author creates a society where everyone who has an above average quality, has to have a handicap
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It's important, with no equality no one wins, everyone ties. Equality will get society nowhere. No one wins the prize and gets the fame with a straight tie. In their current dystopia they have “equality”, they make everyone who is above average wear the handicaps. But that’s not fair, it’s equal but it's not fair. What they need to do is have equity, currently it's like everyone is different heights and there is a big fence that everyone wants to see over, and the government gives them each one box to stand on. This would help the tall people, but the short ones still won't be able to see over the fence. Equity would be the government giving everyone the right number of boxes so that they can all see over the fence. The government in the short story gives their people equality, without all the people, except Harrison, thinking that it's fair. Harrison tries to get people to realize that equality is not right; that it's not really equal, but the government wants everyone to believe that it's okay. Harrison uses technology to try to spread the message of equity and equality but he’s killed because the government doesn’t want their people to start actually being smart. He tells everyone to take off their handicaps because it's not fair for them to have to wear them. He wants everyone to use their brain to it's full potential. The government says they make everyone equal, but in actuality they don’t. Equality would be making everyone a 5/10 in looks, smarts, and so on, but he government makes everyone a 1/10. They’d make the smart people a bit stupider and the not so smart people smarter. People would get some handicaps to be less beautiful but others would get some to make them look better. The government would have too big of a hassle to make everyone equal so they just make the smart people worse. A big question is, does the government have handicaps too? Probably not because they’re part of the government and they “matter more”, so they don’t