Topic # 3
The motivation behind Equality’s placement as street sweeper
When you are younger you are taught that being different is a good thing, to love yourself and embrace it. Then you reach high school where society, the media and your peers degrades the self-image of yourself to nothing; you are taught that different is wrong. Similar to that of the book Anthem you are taught that different is wrong so they scrub your brain clean of any thought to be an individual. However there is one outlier to this ‘perfect’ society; his name is Equality 7-2521. On page 21 Equality understands that he is the outlier, he describes himself as six feet tall and that it is a burden he continues to say “Ever have the teachers and the leaders point to us and frowned and said: There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond your brothers .” The council of vocation placed Equality in the home of the street sweepers with a pure evil motive, they did not want the cursed one to surpass and change the society they had set in place.
Equality 7-2521 from a young age knew that he was different from his brothers. On page 20 Equality recalls his earliest memories of being in the home of infants where he lived with his brothers, during this time in his life equality says that he was not so different from his brothers. It was not until he reached the Home of the Students that he began to know his curse by stating “It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be born different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us.” Equality says that he tried to forget his lessons, he tried to be similar to his brothers but to no prevail Equality was not destined to be of lower intellect.