Group A, Post 4, Omelas and Wage Inequality by Carter Messner

For my final post, I'm going to be writing about the text "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. This story I believe had the most impact on me, and I feel like the message of the story should be used as a societal norm for how we live our lives. This story is about a society that is perfect, and just like most stories about utopias, there is a dark secret that is revealed. The secret being that a young child is being tormented, and the only way for the society to stay perfect, is if the child is never treated kindly. The people in the town who have seen the kid are forced to decide for themselves if they can live in happiness knowing that there is someone in the worst conditions imaginable, or will they leave the town to go anywhere else. The ending of the story is the part that made me think about how our society, specifically the rich, treat others who are supposed to be equal with them, and if the system we have now is really for the good of all people. It ends by talking about the people who decide to leave, "But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.", which is powerful to me because these people are standing up for what they know is right, even if it might bring them harm. I would like to see more people stand up for the right things in this world because the pain of one should be enough the change the mind of a collective. 

We are living in a society that has an idea of an "American Dream", yet you are more like to have an "American Dream" story come out of Canada. That is because the United States, when compared to 24 other countries, "ranks 16th in the amount of intergenerational earnings mobility." (Corak). This means that children that grow up in poorer households are finding it harder to be able to move up out of this poverty, in other words they are unable to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" as politicians like to say, and there is nothing the children can do about it. We have problem in this country where the poor keep on getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer, and unlike the people in Omelas who know that their privilege comes with the pain of another being, the rich in this country do not care about the children who go hungry every night, or the veterans that are living on the street who fought for this country. No, the rich buy politicians to do their bidding, knowing that the tax cuts promised for the middle-class and poor, are going right in the pockets of the billionaires. To tie it back together, I want the billionaires to be held accountable for buying our government and turning it into an Oligarchy. Just like the people of Omelas, the rich know that their corruption is hurting many people, but unlike the people of Omelas I guess they don’t have the morals to stop. I believe that if we act more like the ones who walk away from Omelas, to be able to not accept when other people are treated unfairly even though your life may be unaffected, is a good start to fixing the inequality in this country.jj

hCorak, Miles. "Economic Mobility". The Stanford Center of Poverty and Inequality. (2016) 
 ult/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016-Economic-Mobility-3.pdf

https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016-Economic-Mobility-3.pdf