Michael smiled at me as I looked up from the bin I had been throwing up into. I didn’t smile back.
“How can you allow this?” I asked before facing back into the bin.
“Your world has sacrifices too, all of them do. We are simply honest about ours.”
“Honest…” I wretched.
“That poor child is so sad and scared. It just wants to be loved.”
“And in your world thousands if not millions of children suffer, here, in the Omela’s it is only one child. And, we don’t deny it.”
——
Later, I sat on my perfectly made bed looking out the window onto the perfectly manicured street. I reflected on what had happened.
Michael was who I had been staying with, and, after the party last night I confronted him to find out what it was that was going on in this town that everyone supposedly knew about. He didn’t want to tell me, I had to push him. But the Omela’s residents were good people and he couldn’t like to me.
As LeGinn had said “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas… 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… depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”
I had pushed Michael to show me. Nothing prepared me for what I saw, and I wondered how these people who had seemed so kind and gentle could allow such horror. I couldn’t look at any of them right.
“Please let me out, I will be good”. The malnourished struggling child’s please still rung in my ears. Tears burned at my eyes. I screamed into the pillow. I prayed. I didn’t know how to take this. I wanted to be somewhere good, somewhere without evil.
——-
The choice before me was the same one faced by the citizens of Omelas when they looked upon the tortured child powering their utopia. I could stay, look the misery in the eye, and rationalise it for the greater good.
Or, I could do the unimaginable. I could turn my back on the warmth, walk through the city gates alone, and step back into the dark world.
Others before me chose to walk away, but no one knows what happens to those who leave the Omela’s.
Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas 