The Giver And Harrison Bergeron: The Emancipation Of Equality In Society

What if everyone was finally equal in every which way; it sounds like heaven, right? Well as Barry Goldwater once said, “Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” In the texts, The Giver and “Harrison Bergeron” equality is greatly misunderstood. The community in The Giver restricted color, music, feelings and more to keep anyone from being themselves, or different. The Community in “Harrison Bergeron” forced people to wear “Handicaps” to make everyone completely equal. Handicaps are restrictions, for example, weights if your strong, or a mask if you are pretty. The central idea from The

In the text of “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut the government has wrongly interpreted equality and made it into a ghastly, horrible thing. This is awful because they are nearly torturing their citizens to ensure equality. George is a citizen of the society and the father of Harrison Bergeron. He is required to wear an ear radio, to keep him from using his above average intelligence. This radio like many other handicaps that ensure equality has horrible effects. One example of this is in the text when it states, “But he didn 't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.George winced”( Vonnegut 10/11). This shows that the government is turning equality into a ghastly thing, because, “...George winced”(10/11), and when people