The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

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Ursula K. Le Guin described a society where when one child suffers; the rest of the town is joyful. Without this child locked in a basement, starving and suffering, Omelas beauty and delight would wither and be destroyed (10). The adolescent girls or boys or the man or women, who have seen the child does not go home to weep or rage, they walk out of Omelas because they know they cannot do anything to help this child (12). They walk until they cannot walk any further. In this critique presented by author, Jerre Collins, one aspect that I disagree with his paralleling, would be in trying to relate “The Ones Who walk away from Omelas” to the “Christ–story,” to which I was lead to believe was the Bible. I believe the paralleling of one person’s suffering in order for all of society to be able to benefit some form of gain is as far as the parallel can actually be drawn. In the Bible, society, on an individual basis, was allowed the choice to treat Christ well or poorly; whereas in “Omelas,” no one was even allowed to speak a kind word to the child. The people in “Omelas” understood that even if they removed the child from its poor conditions, the child was already physically and mentally ruined, beyond the point of rehabilitation. Contrarily, Christ was already a perfect person, one who could not be improved upon, who had a history of healing and rehabilitating others. In the ‘Christ-story’, the “scapegoat” is the only way to eternal happiness, but only when recognized, loved, and honored. On the contrary, it was unthinkable of the people of “Omelas” to behave in the manner that their “scapecoat” behaved. Simply bases on this one area in which I disagree, I feel that the areas in which Jerre Collins was referring to, his correlations were weak and

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