A few years ago I was driving home from swim practice in my friends Mom’s van when I realized that I had forgotten my younger sister at the pool. Cold dread filled my stomach. I was supposed to have found her after her practice had finished and taken her home with me. She was eight years old, so obviously she didn’t have a cell phone, and she probably wouldn’t know to go to the front desk and ask for help. I felt so guilty about leaving her that I was shaking as I told my friends Mom about my mistake. I kept imagining her wandering around on her own, wondering where I was. I felt ill as we drove back to the pool to find her. She was fine, but my parents were upset with me and I remember feeling guilty about the incident for days. I eventually forgot about it and life went on, but occasionally I do remember the events of that night. It doesn’t happen regularly, but whenever it does I feel a twinge of guilt.
In the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the author explicitly states that no guilt is felt by any of it’s citizens, even though their happiness is based entirely upon one child’s abhorrent state of deprivation. You could think, then, that they are unaware of the child’s existence, but this is not the case. This concept confused me at first, until I realized how similar to our own society it really was. I wear clothes made by young girls in developing countries working in a factory for less than a dollar a day because they have no other options. I would say most people do. We eat food grown by laborers in other developing nations, whose standard of living is much lower than our own. By doing this, we are in essence supporting exploitation. Our happiness, and our standard of living is dependent on substandard living conditions elsewhere in the world. The deprived child in Omelas represents this. People in our world obviously feel guilt about this because we have charities and various organizations that work to improve the lives of others, and I think the same would be the case for Omelas if they did not have specific rules against showing kindness to the child. Whenever I think about my comfortable life in comparison to others around the world, I feel guilty; I feel guilty writing this right now! But do I constantly feel guilty? No. I do not think that it is possible to constantly feel guilty about the misery of others. Every once in a while I dwell on the unfortunate circumstances that others live in, and I feel horrible. I know some people may assume that teenagers maybe don’t care about anything other than themselves, and that they pay little attention to the world around them, or that they aren’t grateful for the lives that they lead, but if going to school has taught me anything, it’s that teenagers just feel disenfranchised. The problems are too big, and they as one person are too small to make any real difference, so they just stop thinking about the problems. I also feel that sometimes living life gets in the way of feeling the guilt. I’ll go to Wal-Mart and buy the most inexpensive coffee maker and clothes even though I know they are the result of cheap labor, because I have a University education to pay for. Should I feel guilty about wanting to be successful? Like I said, life gets in the way.
