Harrison Bergeron

This story was very interesting. It really made you think about what the future might actually be like. The author had an intriguing way of showing his thoughts on the future. In the story, the government made everyone have the same mentality level. Their main point was to try to make everyone equal and would do whatever is humanly possible to be able to achieve this task. One way of doing this was by putting this special hearing aid in the “above average mentality group”. About every twenty seconds or so, it would make a sound. Whatever the person was thinking about at the time would be washed out of their brains in an instant. This way, no one could think about a certain subject for a long period of time. The way the story goes is something like this: there was a family with an “above average mentality” child , with a somewhat “smart” mentality, a really dumb mother named Hazel, and a somewhat smart dad. Because the dad was so big and strong, the government had to put weights on him. He would have to wear a bag filled with led balls to make him move slower. The son, Harrison Bergeron, was so “smart” that he had to be taken away. On the news, he was described as “extremely dangerous”. There were also dancers with masked faces and body weights to make them equal as well. None of them were that good because of these weights, but there was one special girl that was obviously better than the rest no matter what the government did to try and disable her. Harrison knew that was was going on was wrong. So, he stood up and called himself the emperor and ordered everyone to take off all of their gear. Everyone was hesitant, but did it anyways. He went one by one and ripped off their disability devices. He stated that he wanted a wife and told the dancers that whoever took their mask off first would be his. The girl that was the best dancer took off her mask and revealed her amazingly beautiful face. Harrison then ordered the musicians to play their best and ordered the dancer to dance her best, which was clearly against the law. Harrison took the dancer and started leaping around the room. The head person in charge of the government saw this chaos and shot both Harrison and the dancer to death for disobeying the law. Harrison’s mother, Hazel and his father both saw this happen. They were shocked and depressed in the moment it happened, but couldn’t remember why they were crying a few seconds later. This made me very upset because people should be able to do their best and achieve what they want to achieve. This story wouldn’t let anyone do that and in my point of view, it wasn’t fair at all.