We tolerate exploitation, telling each other that their misery is necessary for overall affluence, though maybe it’s not. When we buy a cellphone or a piece of cheap clothing, there is some exploited worker - a child in the basement. According to this reading, many of us live in societies whose prosperity depends on some faraway child in the basement. In one reading this is a parable about exploitation. “They leave Omelas they walk ahead into the darkness and they do not come back.” They don’t want to be part of that social contract.
Most people feel horrible for the child, and some parents hold their kids tighter, and then they return to their happiness.īut some go to see the child in the room and then keep walking.
#The ones who walk away from omelas quotes free#
If the child were let free or comforted, Omelas would be destroyed. One child suffers horribly so that the rest can be happy. depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” 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. “Some of them have come to see it others are content merely to know it is there. “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,” Le Guin writes. It is terribly thin, lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal a day and must sit in its own excrement. I will be good!” But the people never answered and now the child just whimpers. The child used to cry out, “Please let me out. Occasionally, the door opens and people look in. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect.” It looks about 6, but, actually, the child is nearly 10. In the basement of one of the buildings, there is a small broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no windows. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute.”īut then Le Guin describes one more feature of Omelas. Le Guin describes a festival day with delicious beer and horse races: “An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a “magnificent” farmers’ market. The people in the city are genuinely happy. Maybe you’re familiar with Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s about a sweet and peaceful city with lovely parks and delightful music.
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