EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Worse Than Fiction: America’s Overcrowded Cellar
In a 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin describes a peculiar city where the inhabitants’ prosperity depends entirely upon the endless suffering of a single young child, locked away forever in a cellar. The townspeople ignore the child’s pleas for release because they have learned that his salvation will destroy a world that is utopian in every other way. As Le Guin writes:![](/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/omelas_0.jpg "("Starving Child", 2010, graphic drawing by Anthony Peter Iannini)")
("Starving Child", 2010, graphic drawing by Anthony Peter Iannini)
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.
Although we may be tempted to look for parallels between this troubling tale and the ills of contemporary U.S. society, our attention should instead be drawn to two striking differences. First, whereas in Omelas one child tragically suffers for the welfare of everyone else, in the United States today many, many more children are abandoned to a metaphorical cellar -- not for the greater good, but merely to preserve or enhance the lives of a privileged relative few. Second, the distressing arrangement is unalterable in Omelas, fixed in place by the author’s construction. In our world, the current system instead reflects an outrageous lack of political will and courage.
Who are our country’s cellar-dwelling children? They include the child whose parents have lost their jobs and cannot find the work needed to pay the bills and keep their home. They include the child whose future prospects and enthusiasm for learning have been crushed by too many days in the overcrowded classrooms of an underfunded school. They include the child denied life-transforming treatment for a debilitating illness because her family could not find affordable health insurance. And they include the child whose entire young life has been spent in the shadows of poverty and hopelessness. Of course it’s not only millions of children who are shuttered in the dark underground. But focusing on our country’s youth hopefully enables us to bypass the litany of “blame the victim” talking points that present extreme inequality as good and “free markets” as just distributors of merit-based rewards.
Yet at a time when the top 1% of Americans control a staggering 40% of the country’s wealth, many of our most powerful politicians and their influential backers and lobbyists are now working -- in Washington, DC and in state capitols around the country -- to promote deficit reduction strategies targeting the social service and safety net programs that are lifelines for so many. If these efforts succeed, even more of us -- children, working families, the ill, the elderly -- will soon find ourselves relegated to this ever-expanding metaphorical cellar.
In the press and on talk shows these leaders repeatedly proclaim that the time for “hard choices” and “belt-tightening” has arrived. But their unyielding support for preserving (or even expanding) tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires, and mammoth corporations with record profits reflects a commitment to protect the powerful and financially secure at the further expense of those who are already struggling. This is not a courageous choice worthy of admiration; it is much more accurately viewed as an expedient, callous, and self-interested attempt to redefine heroism. But even children know that heroes save the entire town by slaying the fire-breathing dragon just beyond its walls -- they never chase the dragon into the crowded town square in order to protect the riches of the wealthy.
Today, true heroism is little different in form or purpose. We see it when parents work 16-hour days, stringing together grueling part-time jobs to make sure their children have food and clothing. We see it when neighbors offer a spare room to the family down the block to help them stay off the street after being evicted from their foreclosed home. We see it when community members raise desperately needed funds for an injured child’s medical care. And we see it when students, parents, teachers, and staff unite to protest planned cuts that will hurt their schools.
At the end of her story, Le Guin notes that after visiting the forlorn child in the cellar some residents of Omelas decide to walk away from the city:
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.
In this provocative world, the creation of a writer’s imagination, rescuing the cellar-bound child will harm everyone else. Therefore, leaving Omelas -- relinquishing the comforts gained from another’s suffering and opting instead for an uncertain personal future -- becomes an individual’s greatest act of moral defiance.
The choice facing us today is just as significant in its moral consequences, but it’s not nearly as difficult to make. Fortunately, we are free to act in concert to collectively change our circumstances for the better -- without causing anyone to suffer. We’re limited only by our own willingness to hear and find direction from the many muffled yet resilient voices in our midst. Rather than walking away, we can join together and demand that our nation’s first priority be to protect and empower those in need. In the ongoing deficit reduction debate, this surprisingly simple guidepost marks a path forward that will ultimately benefit us all.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
23 Comments so far
Show AllA comment is worth a thousand words they said. A pie chart that shows the distribution of weath in this country also clarifies where we are. Go to:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
and click on "Income, wealth, and power". Page down to the pie charts and look for the sliver that represents most of us.
Or, go to:
http://www.extremeinequality.org/
Go to "Topics" and click on "Wealth". Again, look for the pie charts.
Thank you for the link: my summary: 17% for the bottom 90 % of which 7% belongs to the bottom 80%. Don't they realize that progressive taxation will be a self-preserving act? Scratch that, that is just how arrogant they are. They think it won't come to that. When those gun toting teabaggers figure it all out, I'm not sure us non-violent dissenters are going to be able to hold them back. Here in WI the frothiest mouthed teachers are those that voted for Scott Walker thinking their property taxes would go down without taking a paycut hit. Hard not to be an "I told you so "wanker in the crowds around the Capital.
Calling it "PROTECTING the wealth of the billionaires..." implies that electeds are simply keeping the oligarchs from losing what they already have, when in fact the electeds are devoting a 110% effort to transferring all of our individual and collective wealth to the oligarchs as fast as possible.
Actually, on the extremeinequality website, I think you may want to click on Data and Statistics, if you want graphics.
Also, this site, linked to in your articles, is eye-opening:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/opinion/12madoff.html
Wonderful!
I walked away from the u.s.government over ten years ago as a matter of conscience. Sure, I'm broke despite working to exhaustion in the fields growing food, but I can dream of the day when everyone joins me in the gardens.
"I walked away from the u.s.government over ten years ago as a matter of conscience."
Six and a half years for me. I was making a VERY good salary. I could no longer stand my own hypocrisy. Now I live in near poverty with an income JUST high enough to preclude participation in LIHEAP (low income heating assistance program - YES, WELFARE, anybody got a problem with that?!?!), but my conscience is clear. I guess that must be worth something.
Hugo Chavez gave away of heating oil to cold yankees in the NE a few year back.
I know the feeling with those cold winters, having heated with wood & electric backup in the not too distant past. There wasn't much need for a gym, except maybe to soak sore muscles in the tub or steam.
Great article, great analogy.
Thank you, Roy, for writing this, and thank you, CommonDreams, for posting it. I sometimes fear that the only way that Americans will wake up is when there are corpses every morning on the sidewalk, to step over until they are collected for disposal. Then Americans, even those in stretch limousines, might think, "Maybe our democracy is dysfunctional. Do you think?" The USA is the richest piece of real estate in the world, and we deep poverty, declining quality of life, and dysfunctional democracy.
Americans would soon become callous to tripping over corpses on the sidewalks, rationalizing that it is better than communism.
Unfortunately, corpses when they decay spread deadly diseases. If no one is picking them up, the number corpses will begin to increase at an ever increasing rate.
Excellent Article. The Truth carries no part of a lie. Capitalism has become the shroud of greed, residing in the embrace of our government.
Beautiful, metaphorical piece that makes a powerful case for fairness and justice for our most vulnerable, and without words of shrillness or anger. Thank you, Common Dreams, for presenting it here, and thank you, Roy, for writing it.
The use of apostrophes gives you away under this latest of screen names. Nice try. You should be ashamed of yourself for arguing the case for the rich... with children waiting hungry in those basements.
Excellent article. The literary analogy really worked to drive the points home.
It is an excellent article.
And on your lesser point-- I assumed another cyclical nym-change was in the offing, since the previous monicker had faded away recently.
But it took until today for the apostrophe-mangling to clue me in.
I clued in when he ranted on Illegal Immigrants once more.
The other "tell" which is as common as the usage of the apostrophe , is the suggestion that any who do not agree with him is a mental cripple.
“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 the 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 . . .”
From “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”
I’m thinking of how this story illuminates how children in my city come to terms with the misery of our ghettos, and how the white middle class has been moving its children further and further away from having to look at this misery, and how the children come to understand that, indeed, their happiness does depend on the misery of others. Helping them, they are told, will only take the big tacky suburban home away from them. Of course, they hardly get the nobility of Omelas, with their one little abused child; instead they get a vapid consumer wonderland. And nobody actually shows them the poor little children tucked away in the inner city up close. But like the children of Omelas, they do come to believe that those children might as well stay there, that their “habits are too uncouth to respond to humane treatment.”
When I teach Le Guin’s story to a largely middle class suburban group, my students often respond that they would accept that child in the cellar. Funny, considering that I usually have them read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” first, where they see the stoning of one innocent a year as outrageous. I teach the two together to show continuity between them.
Keen analysis, Elizabeth H. I, too, flash backed to Shirley Jackson's tale, as it carries a similar theme. One thing we could also expand upon from this story is that Amerikans in general, live a life of luxury compared with those who reside in nations where natual resources are readily extracted to ease our lives, at the expense of foreign citizens. One good example would be the way certain Central American nations plant coffee or fruit to export to Amerika, rather than make use of their land to harvest crops intended to feed Indigenous populations.
The very strange film, "El Topo" shares a surreal parody on this very thing. It's like an acid trip offering up a number of profound moral revelations.
"El Topo" the mole, who, in the film, seeks the light; and when he finds it, he is blinded.
that the citizens of Omelas know of the child, and their gain at the child's expense, puts them ahead of many that live here, now...
I find most unable to comperehend the fact that their cell phone was once a piece of ground, with a tree, a flower, some clover, a stream...
or that they, themselves, were once the same...
or that any future incarnating entity will have a tough time making their body out of destroyed cell phones and Corexit, or with corrupted instructions...
I have no idea what this author is recommending we do, logistically...he dismisses the Olemas 'walking away', which certainly implies sacrificial suicide, and frames revolution as unfair, as it will harm those still wishing to remain within the system...
when the system is detrimental to all, however, what weight is to be given those unable to understand the need to cease? not much...
so, in the end, his advice is to 'join together and demand'?
childish...
Join together, and quit working to pay the banker...then fight the banker and his hired sons of bitches when they come after us...then live the simple life, sharing the resources...
US'ns seem to believe they can attend to their own and resolve the economic problems. This is a mistaken understanding for this is not what has to be cleared up in the USA. The mess is in the US mind and there is no route out of it while there is talk of 'Americans' unless by that word all people in the Americas and thereby the world are intended.
The wealth of the USA is built on the poverty of others in exactly the same way as the wealth of Europe was built on the militarily initiated and enforced poverty of the colonies which was similarly maintained in the name of Jesus and the Law. Having coldly and opportunistically used the World Wars to kill the others in the nest the USA is now The Vampire Bat on our planet, if only in its dreams. Now that this is exposed as a conceit it finds that its 'moral' obligation is to kill in order for it to keep its teeth in the throbbing vein.
Disagree and find you have to pretend that the 'American' presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is for the good of the locals. Every time a word in this intent is uttered people die there.
US'ns are good people. They live in a vastly mistaken country that has made them sick in the head. Though the consequences of this are vast the mistake is small: US'ns think they are exceptional and present reality shows this is absurd.
As in the story the people have to leave the country whose wealth rests on the suffering of the other. There is no future for the USA and the people who stay in it.
Every single lawmaker should be FORCED to live in these conditions for a full year - at least. Let them experience first hand what they are imposing on the less fortunate to suffer. Belt tightening has to apply to all, not just to those who can't defend themselves. I have no sympathy for these "tit suckers"!!!