Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" is a futuristic tale
in which everyone is supposed to be the same. Anyone with special talents and gifts is
given handicaps to counterbalance those abilities. As the opening lines
say:
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.
One young man, Harrison
Bergeron, towered above everyone else, despite his many handicaps. At the end of the
story, when Harrison dances with an equally free and talented ballerina in a display of
creativity, freedom, and individuality, 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.
As the room was in awe
and as this young, talented couple broke all the rules of equality, in walked the
Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. With a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun, she
shot each of them, and all were equal again.
This
particular gun is used under several conditions: large, short-range targets, generally
in the air rather than on the ground. That suits all the conditions here: Harrison was
an extraordinarily large young man, they were a mere thirty feet above her, and they
were in the air.
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