In Kurt Vonnegut's satire "Harrison Bergeron", he overemphasizes the inequalities of people and to what lengths some may go to to fill the gap between those who are different from others and those who are ordinary. For example, in the story those who are smarter than others wear mental handicaps, while more good-looking people are forced to wear masks. Eloquent, well-spoken beings have to disguise their voice and people are assigned weights based on their strength. This is all meant to remove competitiveness and to make everyone equal; but how can people be equal if the handicaps are visible and they therefore know that the other person is better than them somehow?
However much exaggerated, Vonnegut's story gets to the point; no matter what we all have our differences. Try as we might to hide them or change them, they will set us apart. Our differences lead us to our successes as well as our failures, both of which we celebrate, as they make us who we are. Without inequalities to set us apart, we have nothing to strive for, no goals. Life would be a long race with no prize at the finish line. Either that or a race that you train long and hard for and went up against someone who was untrained; say you got first place and they place last. You both get the same reward for an unequal amount of effort. Make sense?
If we reward children equally in sports, as shown in this article, we teach them that life will be like that when they grow up. That no matter what they do, even if they slack off, they end up in the same place as the kid that works the hardest. No matter what life was like in "Harrison Bergeron", that isn't not realistic, and we have to raise kids to be prepared for the real world and not to take life for granted.
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