Topic: If you were a citizen of Omelas, would you stay or would you walk? Please explain and justify your decision.
For one, I feel as if this question almost forces me to search into the utmost depths of my opinions on humanity and my own moral and ethical values, and I find that somewhat intimidating. On the other hand, it really compels me to actually ask myself: If I really was a citizen of Omelas, would I genuinely stay or would I walk? The key word being "genuinely".
When I answered the poll on the blog asking if I would walk away or not, I answered "yes" without virtually any hesitation. But after an engaged class discussion and all the time my brain has had to process things since the time I read the story until now, I'm honestly not so sure. If I could re-take the poll, I'd probably say that it depends. And I'd probably only answer that because that's the closest answer to "I totally don't know". Conversely, I'm the kind of person that likes to stick with a decision once I've made it. So yes, given the choice, I would walk away from Omelas.
To be honest, being so firm about my decision to walk away from Omelas makes me feel a little on edge. For one, it makes me wonder whether I seriously believe that walking away would be the right thing to do even it came at the expense of my happiness, so to speak. Secondly, it makes me question if if I'm a hypocrite for not always "walking away" from the Omelas of reality (pertaining to child labour, and poverty etc). I know that in my heart, I definitely would walk away from a place like Omelas because I feel that their treatment (or lack thereof) of the child is completely unjust. However, I can't promise that my feet would be so enthusiastic to follow.
Yes, I would walk away from Omelas. I would walk away because I don't believe that deliberately ignoring guilt is equivalent to true happiness. I also don't believe that settling for anything less than true happiness is worth it. With that said, I find myself basking in the sad reality of a culture that almost refuses to leave our own "Omelas" because we're comfortable where we are. And personally, I honestly don't think I've had the guts to walk very far yet.
I would walk away from Omelas. I really would. But I'm still trying to discover what walking away actually entails.
Hi Abby,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your thoughts. You do a great job of highlighting something that many of us have experienced in reading Le Guin's short story for the first time. Our instinctual reactions (to leave Omelas in disgust at what is happening to the child) are largely blind to the (often less obvious) instances of this form of injustice in our own culture. And, I appreciate your choice to attempt to defend your gut-reaction to leave Omelas - even if further thought and class discussions may have changed your mind. It is great to hear a number of different perspectives.
I think your analysis could be strengthened if you devoted a bit more time to giving specific reasons for your choice to stay. You spend much of your response analyzing how difficult it is to answer this tough question. However, I think that because of the catch-22 to Le Guin provides for us, the impossibility of reaching a genuinely 'just' conclusion should be our starting point. How would leaving Omelas address the issue at hand? Given the "conditions" Le Guin lays out for us, would this course of action actually help the child?
I am impressed by your honesty and frankness about our own cultural hesitations to walk away from real-life injustices. This type of abstract question (about a fictional story and a made-up utopia) requires a lot of 'real-life' consideration. You did this very well.
- Patrick
I decided to go back and comment on this post, and if you decide not to respond back I will totally understand...
ReplyDeleteReading this post originally I had no idea what Omelas was, or really what you were initially talking about. Later on, I decided to do some searching and I found out about the story of Omelas.
Looking at the situation posed by Omelas, the utopian society where one shall suffer for the good of many, I quickly draw a line to our present world where the rich or the bourgeois capitalize on the suffering and toil of the workers. The same can be said of the developed and first world, where we capitalize on the cheap labour of the third world.
To interrupt my own train of thought, as I was rereading this comment, I was drawn to my line "...the utopian society where one shall suffer for the good of many...", which led me to look back at a famous quote from one of Winston S. Churchill's speech on the Battle of Britain. The line goes something like this, "...never in the field of human conflict, was so much owed, by so many, to so few..." When I read that line I am immediately drawn to our current world situation, so many suffer for the prosperity of so few...
You say you consider yourself a hypocrite for not walking away from the Omelas of our reality, I applaud your honesty. I myself am guilty of the same ignorance to the suffering of the many.
The problem we now face is no longer educating the few on the injustices weighed against the many, rather spurring the collective conscience of the few to rise and demand that our Omelas be equal and available for all.
Sincerely,
Your faithful reader,
~Surrey's last poet...