'On Your Left'

An occasional lefty look at the world

These days I cannot get an Ursala Le Guin short story out of my head. If you have not yet read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," please do. It's a Hugo award winning short story and one of my favorites.

I've thought about it a lot recently. It came to mind when various news media reported that the number of millionnaires in the United States increased 21 percent in the last year, with those in the $5 million club increasing at an even greater rate (38 percent). This at a time when real wages for real people fell at the fastest rate since 1991.

Omelas is a utopian society. Its joy, happiness and abundance depends on the utter degradation of one child. As Le Guin writes:

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

Although you should read the complete story, there are those in Omelas who cannot accept the child's complete abandonment and abuse. They are the ones who walk away from Omelas.

While on my bike in the last few weeks, I've been unable to shake the notion that many people in our society live in a relative bounty of Omelas, yet do not understand that their joy depends on the misery of others. They do not walk away from Omelas--rather, they embrace their bounty and revel in how it is justified. And, then, in a fit of absolute dejection, I wonder if they are right.