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The Government's Idea Of Equality In Harrison Bergeron

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In the short story “Harrison Bergeron, equality is clearly misunderstood, therefore I disagree that everyone in the story is equal. Although everyone was suppose to be equal because of the Handicapper General, they weren't. Equal doesn’t mean everyone thinks or speaks on the same level, equal means that everyone has the same opportunity and chances as others do.The correct way to ensure equality is to encourage success and put infrastructure in place to help and motivate those who are born into situations which limit their opportunities, and in this story, the government has not done this. The government’s idea is to enforce equality by handicapping talented people and preventing those with less talent from bettering themselves.In this story, the government's strategy is "equality by limitation." In American society, it should be "equality by opportunity." When the government attempts to have “equality by limitations”, the use “handicaps” to prevent people with higher levels of knowledge from using their brain …show more content…

How about apologizing for speaking fluently? Would you think that you were being treated equally? In the story “Harrison Bergeron”, The United States Handicapper General called themselves making everyone equal by making everyone speak on the same level. For example, George’s “intelligence was way above normal”, but he couldn’t think like he was supposed to because he had a “mental handicap radio” in his ear to keep him from “taking unfair advantage of his brain.” George had a son named Harrison who was basically a fourteen-year-old genius. Harrison had it the worst, he had earphones instead of a radio and he had “spectacles with wavy lenses to make him half blind and to give him whanging headaches.” He also had to”wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth

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