This article by Barbara Peterson was published in New Hampshire Citizen Action News on November 19, 2019.

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas, we are shown how we accept, with relatively little resistance, that certain people must inevitably suffer from the societal systems so many of us enjoy. I wonder if we can do better. Taking another look at this beautiful and very different short story, I reflect on what it might teach us about restructuring our society so that no one must suffer abominably from the systems we build and maintain.

Le Guin’s story opens with a utopian pageant.

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved.

Music plays, women and men walk happily along chatting, some carrying their babies, and children dart blithely in and out of the pageant line. On their way to the Farmer’s Market, the most wondrous building in the city, they pass banners buoyed by gentle breezes, and see horses braided and beautiful waiting in green fields for the race that follows the parade. This entire marvelous spectacle is to celebrate the perfection that is Omelas.

We readers are asked to participate in the creation of Omelas by imagining an ideal and flawless city. Le Guin makes some suggestions to get us started and help us along: no crime, no poverty or pollution, she says; everything and everyone is pure and picturesque, happiness for all, luxury and comfort without excess. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? she asks, and she suggests perhaps drooze, a slightly intoxicating but non-addictive drug. The place you imagine is Omelas, says Le Guin; it is the very dream of utopian bliss you believed only existed in your imagination.

After having us envision such an extraordinary city, Le Guin worries that we don’t believe it could exist. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? She worries that we don’t believe in Omelas and, worse, that we find it all rather boring and uninteresting.

(To read this article at its original source please click HERE.)