#18: The ones who walk away from Omelas
Can you leave the gates behind?
The second wave of COVID-19 has India by the neck. Please consider donating for oxygen cylinders, vaccines, food, education, masks, beds, medication. You can save a life with the price of a coffee (such is the dichotomy in the world we live in).
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
– Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Omelas is the city of many dreams. Perfect. Beautiful. Unbounded. Whatever you can think of, happens there. Whatever your version of 'ideal' is.
Morally, it's hideous. The luxury of many comes from the suffrage of one, bound together by a contract that's as much ink as willful ignorance. Scratch anything absurdly beautiful and you'll most likely find human misery underneath.
It's not a mystery, it's a naked choice. When citizens come of age, they're made aware of this trade-off. Taken to see the child that is sustaining the unmatchable brilliance of this city while sitting in "its" own filth and muck.
At first, the young adults are shocked. Enraged. Even disgusted, an emotion they'd never experienced in the blinding beauty aboveground. They attempt to make a change.
But in a few days, their fury is tempered by the realisation that their sense of stability and luxury draws from the misery of this child. They wait. They wonder. They carry on living, the child's condition providing context for their over-the-top lives. They take each day with disturbing acceptance, secretly harbouring fears that if it was not that child, it would be one of theirs.
They tell themselves the child's misery is necessary for a life of affluence. Perhaps that the life of one is a small cost to bear for the life of many. Because the contract shall never change.
Now extend this by a few thousands. Some more. Maybe a few millions. The whole world. And do the same to the child. A few incarcerated thousands. Consistently downtrodden races and religions. Genders forced to bow to one. Garbage imperialism, where countries live in filth so the ones that sent them may keep their roads clean and their fashion seasonal. Populations that can't breathe because vaccine apartheid takes what they make for themselves, and gives to others with bowed heads.
In theory, we have textbook reactions. Outrage. Anger. Fear. Doubt. Gratitude. We have values: that one has no claim over the life of another, that humans aren't objects, that all lives matter.
In reality, they don't matter equally. Life is a series of trade-offs, with some groups of people consistently getting the short end of the stick by design, not by luck. The suffering of a few is justified by the thriving of the many. Companies thrive when they enslave en masse. World leaders thrive when they oppress physically, mentally, financially.
The victims, they get cloaks in the form of words: collateral damage. The price to be paid. A cost to be borne. For public safety. For happiness.
And when the few call out for help, just like Omelas' chained child, the many turn their backs. Because the contract has been signed, and the contract must be followed.
But there are some who don't wait or wonder or carry on living. No, they walk "straight out of the city's beautiful gates", turning their backs decisively on the circus of thousands sustained by the degradation of a few.
No one knows where they go. Some of them don't come back. And yet they keep walking, talking, thinking, re-thinking.
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
The world is Omelas. Do you live aboveground, or below? Will you leave the gates behind?