Omelas

I keep returning to Omelas and the ones who walked away. I first read Ursula K. Le Guin's affecting short story as a college sophomore for a philosophy course.

With little experience in the world, what struck me about the story at first was the utilitarian thought experiment it surfaced. Le Guin describes a utopian city in detail, then asks:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

Le Guin then paints a horrid picture of a child kept locked away and in a permanent state of misery. This child's pain is part of the trade for utopia:

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.

The story forces the quesiton: Should we accept the absolute suffering of one in exchange for the absolute joy of all?

So caught up in the literal sophomoric philosophical tension and under the pretenses of fulfilling my responsibilities as a resident assistant to organize activities for my floor, I foolishly tried to assign the text to my residents the story to read and discuss with me over chocolate chip cookies. Not even a warm cookie could entice my residents; no one came.

Still, I kept thinking about Omelas and over the years, returning to the story. In a world where I could spend the rest of my days doing nothing but consuming the new, revisiting incurs costs. But Omelas keeps calling, and I keep returning, only to walk its streets and notice or feel something different.

I read it again sometime in law school, a time when I was quickly learning how the deeply embedded structures of society were not built with human flourishing in mind. No longer could I even philosophically entertain the merit of the bargain of Omelas. I felt in my bones the injustice of the fictional city's deal. More and more, I thought about the ones who walked away. Where were they going?

I wanted to know their destination because I, too, had felt the pangs of disillusionment and I was searching for a new north star. Something in me broke a little going through law school. I entered in the thralls of an Obama-styled hope for careful and almost inevitable progress; I exited with a growing knowledge of law's masters and amidst the chaos of Trump. I'm glad what I brought with me to law school broke, because I became stronger for it. And, in unexpected ways, what replaced the broken is more hopeful and more committed.

After law school, I started a two year fellowship. Having raced through consecutive years of education, this was my first real job, really. I felt a little lost at times, facing professional challenges and more existential ones about what justice work can and should look like. I re-read the short story again some time during that first job and did my best to connect with that feeling of knowing when to walk away from Omelas and allowing myself to truly learn and unlearn.

In law school, I wondered where the ones who walked away went to, but later I began to grasp that no one really knows. One must make the road by walking. Walking away is the spirit on which everything else rests; the north star is an internal one and we must train our capacity to connect with it.

In that spirit, I took a new, different job. Before COVID hit the US, Asha and I moved to Monterey because I took a job at California Rural Legal Assistance in Salinas. I had to improve my Spanish, get up to speed on new areas of law, and learn the ropes of the legal aid model, fast. The new job challenged me and a sense of overwhelm threatened me, sometimes overtaking me. What kept me afloat was just how strongly I felt the spirit of walking away from Omelas in the work that I was doing.

I've struggled to write about my work in the last two years because in many ways, it feels so personal to the people I work for. My team is integrated with local health clinics, where health providers - social workers, doctors, and nurses - can refer patients to us address unmet legal needs. Our caseload is diverse. A normal week might involve preparing a pregnant farmworker for their appeal of denied disability benefits, analyzing the validity of a tenant's eviction notice, helping a worker understand their rights to job protected leave because of their medical situation, and assisting a parent trying to understand how they can best advocate for their child with a disability to get the education they deserve.

The work can be hard, but it's always good. Though I have struggled with overwhelm and the challenges of having a client-facing job as an introvert, I'm stronger than I thought I was and I keep learning how to see things better. I meet people, their families, and their story, and I am always growing.

In the weirdness of the new pandemic and the new job, I re-read the story. This last time, I thought about the child that Omelas kept in a tragic state for the city's bargain and how to think about our own society's "child." In some ways, the deserters of Omelas had the courage to reject a tempting deal; in other ways, they could see so clearly the tragedy of the deal given its singular expression in the abused child. To the surprise of none, our society is more complicated. There is no one being that shoulders the burden of the trade. There is no golden world. The misery is distributed and the world still broken. One has to work hard to see this misery because our systems' basic functioning depend on us never seeing it.

The pandemic sharpened the cruelty I saw. "Essential" workers picked our food, packed it, shipped it, cooked it, and delivered it to our doorstep. No where is the child of Omelas. "Essential," yet fungible, these workers' labor stays hidden for our convenience and compliance. Omelas presents the suffering transparently. Everyone must know. As my brother said to me, in our world, "the trick is most people aren't allowed to see it." The veil is intentional.

What I've learned is that so much of the initial work of walking away is clear sight. I dream of what those who exit Omelas are building, something new, something just on the horizon. But sometimes you can't know what to build until you know what you cannot endure. We only learn that with eyes wide open. The seeing, and the visceral moral intuition that floods us with the sense that what we see is wrong, is a powerful compass.

I am still learning about how we hide the child and what to do about it. I do not pretend to have the answers. I am not enlightened. I’m just walking. I’m just walking.