“What didn’t kill me, it didn’t make me stronger at all.”

In the dystopian story “Harrison Bergeron” Kurt Vonnegut imagines a world in which the innate differences among people are eliminated by handicapping those with greater talent, strength, grace, beauty, or intelligence. The effort to equalize will fail because people will see the heavier weights on ballerina’s ankles, the uglier masks to cover beautiful faces, and the louder sounds to cloud the thoughts of the highly intelligent are perceived as markers of grace beauty and intelligence and therefore people will always perceive difference. When Hazel, a person of perfectly average intelligence, envies her husband George’s mental handicap radio which makes a loud noise so he forgets his thoughts every twenty seconds, she does not envy the irritating noise she envies the intelligence that sets him apart as shown by the device he must wear. Moreover, the efforts to weigh down the graceful or strong may fail in the longer term because those who are determined to excel physically will simply get stronger by wearing weights.

            To the extent that the handicap system succeeds in making announcers with beautiful voices stutter, or ballet dancers stumble and shuffle the effort to equalize makes every form of human achievement boring. People only want to watch basketball, or ballet to marvel at the talent and achievement of those who can do extraordinary things. To make the extraordinary into the ordinary deprives those of ordinary abilities of the joy of admiring talent and achievement that they cannot attain.

“And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, this would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

My title is a quote from Ed Sheeran

And my end quote is from The Fault in Our Starts by John Green

“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.”

In a play on the notion of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, W. H. Auden proposes a monument to the perfectly average and therefore entirely forgettable man. His poem “The Unknown Citizen” describes a monument built to honour “one against whom there was no official complaint”, who “satisfied his employers”, “was popular with his mates” and reacted to advertisements normally in every way.  He purchased on the “Installment Plan… everything necessary to the Modern Man.”

He did absolutely everything that was expected of him, nothing more, and nothing less. The statue honours him for being perfectly ordinary. Yet he has no known name, and as Auden points out we don’t know the two most important things about him “Was he free? Was he happy?”

Ironically, although Auden suggests his averageness makes him anonymous because he has no name in the poem, he is the subject of sustained research efforts by the government Bureau of Statistics, Social Psychology workers, and Producers Research. This imagery ordinary man is conjured up in memory by Auden’s poem just as the unknown solders are remembered by their anonymous tombs to stand in for all the people who lived and died without making any particular mark on the world.

“Be a true Heart, not a follower.”

My title is a quote from a Sarah Dessen book called The Truth about Forever

And my concluding quote is from Ed Sheeran