Harrison Bergeron

HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he 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 random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.

A Perspective on Gay Marriage

As an ordained Southern Baptist minister, a born-again Christian for 20 years, and an American citizen, I’d like to offer my perspective on “gay marriage” in light of recent rulings in California.

I’m sure I don’t speak for all Christians, for many calling themselves “Christian” would probably take issue with my position. You see, unlike much of Evangelical Christianity, I make a distinction between the Church and the State. American citizens are governed by the Constitution, not the Bible. Though God’s Laws apply to all mankind; and all mankind will ultimately be judged by them, the fact remains that most of mankind lives in rebellion to God. They can’t submit, don’t want to submit, and will not submit to Him in this lifetime. They are sinners by nature and, unless God graciously and supernaturally changes their nature (what the Bible calls being “born-again”) no one should expect them to live by the standards set forth in God’s Word.

This fact goes well beyond gay marriage. More than half of all Americans do not live within God’s definition of marriage: divorce; multiple marriages; children out of wedlock; cohabitation; adultery; pornography; masturbation, etc.. To single out gay marriage as the battlefield on which to take a stand for the “sanctity of marriage” without first policing our own sanctuaries for violators is rank hypocrisy. God is the sole creator and definer of marriage and anyone not submitting to His definition is in sin.

Here is where I may stray from the reservation: I believe all American citizens should have equal rights under American law. What does that mean? Homosexual couples should be able to enter into a STATE-SANCTIONED union that affords them the same rights and privileges as married men and women. I come to this position not as a Christian, but as an American citizen who loves liberty. My liberties cannot be separated from other’s liberties; they are intrinsically entwined. If one American loses rights, it is only a matter of time before I lose mine. Thus, in standing up for someone else’s liberty, I ultimately safeguard my own.

HOWEVER, though I support state-sanctioned unions with equal rights for all citizens under the Constitution, I oppose the REDEFINING of marriage. Marriage is what it is: a union of one man and one woman. Marriage is God’s gift to humanity and only He has the right to define it. It would be like trying to redefine the definition of “homosexual” to include heterosexuals! The term “homosexual” would instantly lose its meaning! Just as “homosexual” has a specific meaning with boundaries, so marriage has a specific meaning with boundaries. This is not a hostile position; it is simple LOGIC. One does not require being a Christian to see the logic in this viewpoint.

Some Christians don’t want any sort of homosexual unions, regardless of what they are called. Under the Constitution, these Christians are – in my opinion – wrong. On the same token, some homosexuals don’t merely want equal rights as married men and women; they want to hijack the term and institution of “marriage.”

Another reason Christians ought to support state-sanctioned unions – and the state ought to protect the definition of marriage – is to preserve religious freedom. You see, as a pastor, I should have the religious freedom to choose whom I will and will not marry. I reject couples now who do not fit into God’s requirements for marriage. If the state simply sanctioned unions without redefining marriage, it should (I use this term cautiously) protect pastors from being forced to perform same-sex unions against their conscience. However, if the state redefines marriage, and I reject a homosexual couple based on Biblical convictions, I fear the state would force me to put state law (and the state’s definition of “marriage”) above God’s Law.

If all parties would put emotion and hostility aside; and be compromising enough to maximize the protection of everyone’s liberties; we could probably come to a resolution both sides are happy with. So, I say to the homosexuals who may read this: I care about your liberties, will you care about mine?

The Parable of the Surgeon

One evening, after a long day in the operating room, a tired surgeon was traversing the backwoods road that lead to his country home. As he rounded a blind curve, he could see taillights and smoke in the distance. Coming closer, his headlights illuminated a sporty car smashed head-on into a large oak tree. He quickly pulled behind the car and, after a quick call to 911, ran towards the scene. Behind the steering wheel was a young woman, unconscious and bleeding profusely from an undetermined wound. His medical training immediately kicked in and he began a medical assessment to determine the extent of her injuries. Airway? Clear. Breathing? Check. Heartbeat? Faint, but palpable. Starting with her head and moving down, he felt for anything out of the ordinary: bones out of place, mushiness where it should be firm, open wounds, etc.. Her right hand was crushed and pinned between the steering wheel and some part of the car that was no longer recognizable. It was ugly, but not life-threatening. As he reached her inner thigh, his heart sank. A gaping wound located near her femoral artery was bleeding heavily. If her femoral artery was lacerated he knew she would bleed out and die. Time was not on her side, and even a medi-vac helicopter would take some time to arrive this far out of the city. He had to get her out of that car and up into his headlights so he could attempt to stop the bleeding. Fortunately, as a doctor, he always carried an emergency medical kit in his car for just such occasions, never dreaming he’d ever need to use it.

Undoing her seatbelt, he grabbed her left arm and tried to tug her out of the car, but her right hand could not be budged from its grotesque vice. No matter how hard he tried, no matter what angle he pulled from, it was not moving. He was left with no choice: he must cut off her hand. For a moment he paused and looked at the woman’s face. “She’s so young. She’s got her whole life ahead of her. How negatively will having only one hand affect her life? What if she’s an athlete? What if she’s a mother? How will she care for and hold her children?” These sympathetic thoughts quickly gave way to reason and years of medical knowledge, “If I don’t do it, she won’t have a life; she will die right here.”
So, he quickly ran to his car and returned with the medical kit. “Thank God she’s unconscious” he thought, as he sawed through the bones. Finally freeing her, he carried her limp body to the light and did his best to slow the bleeding until EMS arrived. He said a prayer for the unknown woman as the sirens disappeared in the direction of the medical center.

The next morning at work, he asked the on-call surgeon how the woman was doing. “She lost a lot of blood, but she is in stable condition. If she had gotten here any later, she probably wouldn’t have made it. You did the right thing removing her hand: it saved her life.”

Over the next several days, the surgeon continued to check on the young woman. He met her family and they thanked him for saving her life. Eventually, the woman awoke and was told what had happened. The next time the doctor came to see her, she gave him a big smile and expressed sincere gratitude for his action.

As days turned to weeks, and recovery turned into rehab, the reality of not having a right hand began to sink in. Simple tasks – things she used to take for granted - such as writing, brushing her hair, or buttoning a blouse, had to be relearned. Frustration and doubt filled her mind. Well-intentioned friends and family had made comments earlier on: “Did he really have to cut off your hand?” “Don’t you think he went a little too far?” “I’m not a doctor, but I’m sure he could have saved you without such extreme actions.” At first, while the accident was still fresh in her mind, she defended the surgeon’s actions, knowing he only did what he had to do. But now, weeks removed from danger and struggling to learn how to live without a hand, she began to have her own questions. “Maybe he did take things too far.” “Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be.” “He was wrong to remove my hand.”

The woman wasn’t the only one second-guessing. The surgeon, seeing how difficult her rehab was going, also questioned his decision. He rehearsed the accident scene over and over in his head, wondering if he could have done things differently. “Maybe I overreacted.” “Perhaps she wasn’t in as much jeopardy as I thought.” “I could have waited for EMS to pry the steering wheel off her hand.” He took his thoughts to the man he trusted more than anyone: the chief surgeon of the hospital. This man had all the answers. After all, he wrote most of the textbooks the surgeon had used in medical school. He was the surgeon of surgeons; a trainer of surgeons. He was also a trusted friend. The surgeon shared his concerns with the chief surgeon, who assured him he did what was necessary to save her life. The chief surgeon would have done the same thing.

Assured in his mind, and affirmed by the chief surgeon, the doctor went down to visit the woman, who was about to be discharged and was surrounded by family. As he entered the room, the warm greeting he was accustomed to was replaced with a cold, “What are you doing here?” Stunned, he stumbled for his words, “I…uh…came to see…” “She doesn’t want to see you anymore! You’ve scarred her for life with your careless and insensitive act.” “But, I was trying to save her life.” “What you did was unnecessary. There had to be a better way. Now, look at the harm you’ve caused her. That hand will never grow back.” “But, she would have died…” “That’s your opinion. We may not be doctors, but we think she would have survived. Now, kindly turn around and leave. Go practice your brand of medicine somewhere else.”

Saddened and heartbroken, the surgeon slowly turned and walked away. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be practicing medicine anywhere. Maybe I should leave medicine all together and pursue a different career; one where life and death decisions don’t have to be made.”

Confused and distraught, he hopped in his car and started the long trek home. On his way, he rounded a corner and saw a car smashed into a tree. He kept driving.

*If you haven’t already guessed, this story is a sad analogy about the perils and pains of church discipline. The surgeon is a pastor; the woman/family a church; the hand represents a sinning member under discipline. You can figure out who the Chief Surgeon is!