In the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. LeGuin asks us to imagine an ideal society.  It’s a place where all the children are happy, all the adults are thoughtful and passionate, and there is not a need or a want that goes unfulfilled.

Halfway through its description of Utopia, however, the story takes a serious change in tone.  LeGuin describes how there is one child who lives a much different type of existence in a room under one of the city buildings: 

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. The door is always locked; 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 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.

And these deplorable living conditions are not a secret to anybody.  As the people of Omelas carry on with their “blissful” lives, they are all aware of the pitiful child who leaves beneath them and of his terrible suffering:

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. 

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

One by one, the people have learned to accept the reality of the situation, and they are able to carry on their idyllic existence in spite of, and possibly even because of, the suffering of the child.  Except for a few.  A few of the residents of Omelas have done something quite extraordinary:

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.

When I think about the current state of our corporate capitalist economy, I think about Omelas.  I think about how the American economy has not only met the basic needs of its citizens, but has has given most of us a lifestyle of leisure and luxury. 

But I also think of how we have our own rooms under our own buildings where we have our own versions of that child living and suffering in its own filth.  I think about the day as a teenager when I went to Mexico and first laid eyes on true poverty, and I think of the times I have fallen silent because I can’t get the images that I saw out of my head (as well as many things I have seen in the US).  At times, just like some of those youth from Omelas, I think of walking away from my position of relative privilige.

Especially today, that call is growing louder for those of us who can’t ignore the child in the basement.  Perhaps the call is not to physically leave behind our homes and our loved ones, but rather to walk away from the corporate-based economy that benefits many, but that keeps others enslaved.  Perhaps we needed this economic collapse to wake us up.  Perhaps we needed to see the naked greed of our financial captains, the pervasive corruption and complicity of our government, and even the plight of the millions who are losing their homes and their jobs and their livelihoods.

So I am asking you to imagine this:  What if people from all walks of life simply removed themselves from the big business economy?  What if we stopped investing in the stock market? What if we stopped patronizing large corporations?  What if we stopped measuring economic health by how much we produce and consume?  What if we spurned the notion that it’s a good thing to amass large quantities of wealth for yourself? What if we stopped believing that greed is good?

What the few people who found the courage to walk away from Omelas realized is that the current system is intolerable, and there is a better way out there.  I’m confident that they found what they were looking for, and that we can too.

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