Here I am looking at ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ by Ursula Le Guin. Then, I’ll be sharing a profile of the Salaam Baalak Trust.
Below are lines from her short story, put together to illustrate the points below. Please have a look at her full short story, it’s a great read.
The story begins in the idyllic utopia of Omelas. It is the first day of summer and there is a beautiful festival set to take place. The music ‘beat faster’ with a ‘shimmering’ of Gong and Tambourine and people went dancing. ‘The air of the morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air under the dark-blue sky’
They were not simple people- bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.
The trouble is, that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.
One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be?
What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage.
A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: This is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life.
In the room, a child is sitting. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.
They all know that it has to be there. 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.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion.
Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.
Some, once they see the child, they leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
[sections of the story selected from the original to illustrate points below]
The chief moral tension in this story is that the happiness of the entire world of Omelas is based on the endless suffering of one trapped child. The child appears to be innocent but is never given a chance to join society. Most people figure some way to justify the child’s suffering and move on with their lives and live happily.
This eerily echoes our own world. We don’t have total happiness, but we do have many comforts where we have pushed out the suffering of others from our minds. Most of us have colorful wardrobes of soft and colorful clothing and we will happily buy it wherever we get it cheaply. We push away any thoughts of human rights violations in the supply chain. Even more ubiquitous is our smart phones- they give us connectivity, entertainment, safety etc. We know that the mines where cobalt is brought out from the ground often violate the rights of children, but we don’t think about it all and mass produce them instead.
Smart phones are lauded as the great innovation of our time- we look up to Steve Jobs and think nothing of those children. I include myself in this category.
Here is a excerpt from a report from Wire ;
“Participation of children in mining is recognised as one of the worst forms of labour. As mines are located in remote places, child labour remains proverbially ‘hidden’.”
“We are the child labourers of the iron ore mines with red iron in our lungs… We are fourteen, we are eight, we are also five and four, and our metallurgical skills start from the time we crawl. Most of all, we can be made invisible. If you do not look at us, you cannot see us, for; THERE ARE NO CHILD LABOURERS IN THE MINES.”
The people from Omelas are braver than we are. They routinely take young people, once they are of age, and force them to confront the cost of their society’s happiness. People reckon with the decision; some accept it, and others leave. We don’t even do that.
I wonder what would happen if each one of us was made to see the suffering of others which makes our lives possible. What if we cannot prevent those mines being operated by children. If we were forced to see it, and that was the cost for all the digital activity we have today, what would we do?
The people who leave Omelas seem to know where they are going. I don’t think most of us would turn away from the world as we know it. Beyond that, how would we survive alone, out in a world that we wouldn’t be able to WikiHow to build a fire? I think we would try to change the situation of the mines. I think we would try to fight for justice. But even then, our tools of technology would probably be what we use to make that fight happen.
Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. Beyond the things that we can change; I don’t think I’ve looked at the suffering that exists that I can’t do anything about. I never thought there was any point in looking at the suffering of others unnecessarily but now I’m not so sure. I don’t think my answer would be to walk away from society. At any given point, in my lifetime, there will be people suffering.
Even though the child is suffering, Ursula le Guin doesn’t ask artists to focus on the ‘terrible boredom of pain’, instead she says we have ‘almost lost hold; we can no longer describe any happy man, nor the celebration of joy”. A lot is left ambiguous in this story. In 1988, Mira Nair made a film called ‘Salaam Bombay’ about the life of street children. She cast real street children for all the parts. While her film focused on the difficulties they faced, it was also about family, love and hope. This doesn’t always happen, but it inspired the beginning of ‘Salaam Baalak Trust’ to help the children.
The film trailer brought up so many emotions in the first minute that I decided to stop watching it. I’ve always insulated myself from the suffering of other people.
I went and visited Salaam Baalak and learnt about the lives of the street children, directly from them. It was the first time I investigated a social issue. This story made me think most about the suffering I cannot change. Should I know it or not?
Maybe I’m one of the people who would stay in Omelas, maybe I wouldn’t walk away.
Maybe ours becomes a responsible happiness for the things we cannot change.
The story asks us to examine our expectations for happiness in our own society, is it impossible for us to imagine a truly happy society? What did this story make you think of? What questions did it ask of yourself?