Â§hria's Spot

Equal but different is good

Last night I watched a very Canadian movie based on one of my favourite short stories, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Equal is not the same, for many good reasons, was sort of the basic message.

You can read the story for yourself here, if you like.

"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." -- Vonnegut, 1961

So, when I see a beautiful woman, instead of thinking about how like something the cat drug in, I am free to choose to appreciate, enjoy and even celebrate her beauty.

Its about choices.

Its about choosing to react to envy with honest appreciation instead of willful destruction (of the self or of the person being envied). Its about choosing to take the envy to another level of awareness.

Why bother? Well, because envy to the next level means an awareness of the qualities one wants to possess. It means we can set goals to improve ourselves. It means we can choose to strive to create the very qualities in ourselves that we envy in others.

In Harrison Bergeron, the society's leaders sought to make everyone equal to (or rather the same as) the lowest common denominator in the social group.

A simple mathematical equation can demonstrate the flaw in that argument.

62+69-13=62x2.25-21.5

Obviously the two sides of this equation are different but they are equal.

So, step three in this flow of logic would be that we need not strive to be other than we are for we are equal to but different from our fellow woman (or man).

If I see and envy a woman with long waves of beautiful blonde hair cascading over slender shoulders, I need not run out to Wal-Mart for a bottle of hair bleach. Instead, I should look at my own hair and appreciate its qualities.

Now, if I could only figure out what qualities I have that make me equal to but different from those beautiful women.

I'm still feeling like something the cat drug in. My logic is cold and empty. A little help here, please? What am I missing?

Anyway, call me Hazel and kiss me with a 12-guage. Its the ending of the story I like the best, or the climax... but you will have to read it for yourself if you want to know just how twisted I am.

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