Omelas Sounds Like Omelets

We just read the story by Ursula K. Le Guin entitled "The One Who Walk Away from Omelas", and I am here to tell you that Omelas sounds like Omelets.

That being said, I found this story to be very trippy.  And yet...I kinda liked it.  Granted, I didn't like it nearly as much as, say, "Temple of the Holy Ghost".  But it was still good.

What struck me most, and I'll be sure to share this in the class quiz tomorrow, was a line that said "The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy..."

In this statement, Le Guin is saying that there is a right kind of joy and a wrong kind of joy.  Omelas, at first glance, is a very socialist version of Ethiopia.  There is no war; there is only peace.  There is celebration.  There is happiness.  And then that statement was made, and we find that ultimately this Ethiopia is dictating what is right and wrong.  And there, in and of itself, is reason for controversy.

My thoughts aren't coming together because I'm much too tired and relish too much in the art of rambling.  But we'll see what becomes of my rambling.

The story would have been awful without the role of the "it" tucked away in the storm cellar.  But I feel pretty confident that Le Guin wrote this story FOR that character, and this is the reason why I find this story to be decent.

This character, clothed in nothing but a shroud of darkness and trembling in its feces, represents the humanity of humanity.  Who we really are, when we stuff our imperfections in a basement, is the evil that exists in our soul.  The reason why the human race created by God is different from the Omelasians is because we are redeemable.  God has set forth the process of being redeemed and we can be within reach.  Why?

Because we're trying?  As a societal whole, we are trying to be better.  There are those in the world that don't.  But I really have to believe that there is more desperation for right than a satiating of lust for wrong.

The Omelasians, though, are all quite aware of their humanity--their fleshliness--and instead of improving life for everyone for the ground up, the bottle that which they deem unworthy and "the right kind of joy", or the right kind of entertainment, or the right kind of PERSON, as it would eventually become, is all that's allowed in daylight.

And that's the Omelets for you.