Harrison Bergeron Redux

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – One of the hardest jobs a weekly columnist has is to find something fresh to write about each week. Some weeks it’s like pulling out your hair to find a topic you’ve not written about before yet you know something about. That “pulling out your hair” part is — more often than not — one of the biggest problems I have. The “know something about” part is where I really fail.

But it’s not just finding a topic that I know something about, it also should be something I care about. There’s too much nonsense out there to care about, so being a semi-wiz at “Trivial Pursuit” doesn’t help much either.
But what does help is when something comes up that I’ve written about before, which in this case is twice, which allows me to say . . . “See, I told you but nobody did anything about it!”

That kind of hit me between the eyes when the issue of withholding notification of National Merit Award notifications became a national issue, at least “national” in the sense that several major news networks reported on the issue while many others ignored it. So I guess it’s more proper to say it became a semi-national issue. Yeah, I think I got it right this time.

Anyway, the thrust of the news stories is that a Virginia school district, apparently populated by morons, decided it would not pass on to their students that they were National Merit Award winners. Of course that was just plain stealing, for which they should go to jail.

The designation as a National Merit recipient gives the student so designated the secret password to college admissions, especially to those institutions of higher learning that carry particular weight in academic circles, and to scholarships that will help all families, especially struggling ones, to pay for their little bundles of joy’s education, and in some instances to the doctorate level.

Now while my wife is checking the records of Dowling High School in Des Moines to find out why my notification wasn’t forwarded to me when I graduated (I think the Pony Express rider may have died en route), the question remains: Why did these morons withhold the information to the point that students were unable to use it on their college applications? Well at first it was simply an administrative error — accidental to be sure, but an accident nonetheless. Of course that was wrong because the same thing happened in at least 18 individual schools.

Nope, the true story is now coming out. It seems that the enlightened morons who run the place decided not to notify the kids who won because it might make the kids who didn’t win feel badly about not winning. Yes, they are truly morons — the administrators, not the kids. And not just plain normal everyday morons, they are criminal morons who stole the rightful acknowledgment from the students who had earned them, as well as the college admissions and scholarships in which the award provided entry.

But to go a bit further, the school’s attitude is part of a trend that is taking root — if it has not already done so — in academia in every state in the union. It is the progressive concept of “equity,” a word that should not be confused with “equality,” which is often done. Equity, you see is where all the results are equal, equality is where everyone is given the same chance to succeed.

Equity is entwined with the box checking you’ve seen practiced by the administration. There needs to be so many employees who fit in each demographic box. See! Everything now is equal, that’s equity. In short it means that merit is no longer the proper judge for such things like, for example, college scholarships. Equity is the all-important factor for it is necessary for all to obtain the same level of achievement.

Of course no one would apply that standard to the National Basketball Association because the concept is just stupid, as shown by the morons running the schools in Virginia who played hide-and-seek with the National Merit Awards. Meritocracy means something, least it confines our society to what I suggested last May in a column “Dumbing Down Equality,” and in a June 2018 column, “Harrison Bergeron’s America.”

Both times I wrote about a short story written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1961, entitled, if you haven’t guessed, “Harrison Bergeron.”
In a nutshell, here’s the Harrison Bergeron story:

It is set in a future America in which the government has declared that every person is fully equal in all respects: equal in intelligence, in beauty, and in skills, just like the morons in Virginia are professing. In order to facilitate this policy the government provides artificial handicaps for those who are too smart, pretty, or skilled in order to equalize all persons, just like withholding National Merit results. See what the progressive version of equity is? A deeply distorted view of equality.

The government, to monitor this new policy, appoints a handicapper general, one Ms. Diana Moon Glampers who provided handicaps for those needing them. Those who are too smart have ear plugs that pounded radio sounds into their heads so they can’t optimize their intelligence; graceful ballerinas are provided foot weights so they can perform no better than average, and the beautiful have masks so as to appear no more beautiful than the ugly or disfigured.

Thus the best, the brightest, and the most intelligent are handicapped to attain the goal of total equality. The main character, Harrison Bergeron, finally sheds his handicaps and dances with a ballerina who has also shed hers. That, of course, violates the law and Handicapper General Glampers is forced to execute them both.

Now I hope this doesn’t give any ideas for the morons who run the schools in Virginia; I’d hate for them to get the idea that maybe the National Merit finalists should be exterminated. Of course, that would ease any depression a non-finalist might feel over not making the grade.

Anyway, you can see where I’m going with this: to a bad place, and it’s not limited to just schools. And if we allow the morons to run our major institutions with their imbecilic ideas, we may all find ourselves under the thumb of another Diana Moon Glampers. Now pay attention to the news — the real news — and you’ll discover there are plenty of folks vying for that job now.

I bet some of you could probably supply some names, and you’d probably be correct.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/).