The Man

Harrison Bergeron from Harrison’s Point of View

By Harrison S.

The year was 2086 and had been like no other year before. Those who were lucky were not sent to the bad place, though The Man had made life so dry and boring. Civilization was on the only habitable place left in the world, Antarctica. Life on the world can not be remembered by anyone but The Man. The one thing that knew was that the earth had been polluted so severely back in the “Good Times” due to the corruption, ignorance, and laziness of society. Global warming killing all species of animals but humans. Those who had survived escaped the barren wastelands to the one continent that once was ice though now a dry desert Antarctica. Antarctica was the only place in which people had not inhabited during the “Good Times” and was not contaminated with this filthy and toxic material called plastic. The Man said that in order to prevent this catastrophic event from happening again everyone needed to follow the rules that he had made, and never disobey him and his higher power.

Society was made to be equal, though everyone knew that The Man really did it to just keep control over everyone. Clothing was all the same white polyester clothing in which there had been not even a speck of hair. The shoes were white sneakers, pants were white shorts or khakis, and there was no way to be different. Babies were born artificially, meaning that babies were born out of test tubes, which took away the idea of really ever being considered human. This was an idea that I could only grasp because I was different than all the other test-tube babies. The Man thought it best for all of us to not have any abilities to think out of the ordinary or have any intellectual capability. He wanted us to be this word I once heard called stupid. Also, I forgot to mention that we had a restricted limit of 100 words that were to only use and say because of the way that a better vocabulary would lead to an intelligent human being.

I am for some reason different from everyone else because my IQ is more than twenty. I had thought in a much more logical and diverse way than everyone else. Everything in the society was bland and I still saw the color in it. One day, when I was at my assigned family’s house or “the providers,” something felt different. As though there was a humongous weight on everyone's shoulders and there was no reasonable way to explain what was to come...