Explaining Equality: Opinion of a teenager
This is my interpretation of equality
Last week in my English class, we were reading a short sci-fi story written in the 1960s called “Harrison Bergeron.” The story is about equality, but an interesting perception of it. Since the story was written in the ’60s by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, the story is deeply affected by the civil rights movement at the time.
The story is about equality in the future. In other words, equality in the year 2081. The United States government is said to have over 200 amendments and people are “equal.” Intellectual people are not intellectual. Attractive people are not attractive. Physically-fit people are weak and not fit. All because everyone is equal and no one has the right to be different. However, the people who are lacking are lacking just as usual and were not affected by this equality.
The writer explains the message of the story in an interesting way. He tells the story about a boy named Harrison Bergeron, who is intellectual, attractive, and physically very fit. His father — an intellectual man — and his mother — a woman who couldn’t be more clueless about life — watch as their son gets murdered but are completely ignorant towards it, as they are not intellectual people and they could not comprehend what had happened. But wait! I had said that the father was intellectual. How did he not realize his son just got murdered? To explain this, the father was ordered by the government to always wear an earpiece that has noises of gunshots and explosions just so he can’t think his intellectual thoughts and he can’t use his brain to comprehend his son’s death. On the other hand, the mother was too clueless to even remember seeing it happen just seconds after the incident.
The government in this story had finally achieved its centuries-long dream of equality but at the expense of humanity’s individuality. And all this, made me think: What is equality?
After thinking long and hard, I noticed that there is no answer to my question. The question is, in a way, rhetorical. However, if we really had to, the answer would be: Equality means to look for the individuality in ourselves and understand that we are all unique in our own way. In Vonnegut’s alternate reality, we were all looking for the wrong thing.
Furthermore, I believe that in order for someone to truly understand the writer’s message and contemplate on my specific interpretation of it, they must first read the story and find their own understanding of what equality is along the way.
