Same and Equal

In our discussion last week about “Harrison Bergeron” we brought up the words “equal” and “same.” In this short story, society has forgotten that these things are separate. The story begins: “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.” Instead of giving its citizens equal rights, the “agents of the United States Handicapper General” forces U.S. citizens to be exactly the same. And since it is easier (and possible) to make people dumber, less athletic, and uglier, than to improve education, mess with genetics or plastic surgery to make people physically the same, they use “handicaps” to bring everyone down to the same level. I find this concept fascinating, because we know as humans that other people are better at us in some ways and that we are inevitably better than other people in other ways. In this future society, however, it is wrong for anyone to be better, because that means that people are not equal.
We also talked about how despite the fact that people are handicapped down to the same level, the parents in the story, George and Hazel, still judge people based on their handicaps. For example, when they were watching a certain ballerina, 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.” People still judge other peoples true capabilities by how much they need to be handicapped to be brought down to the average. Vonnegut seems to be saying that humans will always judge who is the most beautiful, the strongest, the smartest, etcetera, and trying to make everyone the same is doomed to fail. We can make all people equal as seen by law, but not as seen by each other.
People being the “same” was also brought up in “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which is also a short story about the future. All of the hostesses in the story “hold advanced degrees in psychology and nursing,” and are “plump and rosy, and at least six feet tall.” To the hostesses “any old man, cute and senile, who quibbled and joked and reminisced for hours” was called a “Foxy Grandpa.” All “nothingheads” exhibit the same behavior. People don’t seem to be individuals in society, in Vonnegut’s many imagined futures, but machines that merely function within society as they are told they should. Although in both cases there are people who break through the mold and fight society to be themselves: Harrison and Billy the Poet.