Content warning: graphic descriptions of violence 

It was a gorgeous weekend in the French Quarter. Too hot, but I didn’t mind, because I had a tall iced coffee. I sat in a café reading a detective novel (The Maltese Falcon) and eating grits, collard greens, and poached eggs. It was one of those Sunday mornings that makes me recall Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to notice pleasant moments and remind yourself: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” 

They sure do make it easy to forget the atrocities. So long as you make sure you don’t pick up a newspaper, you can just go about your business. You can sit under oak trees and sip mint juleps, untroubled and untouched by events thousands of miles away. You send in your taxes, but the government’s not going to send you a report tallying up the number of children they killed with your money. There might as well not be any children. You can pretend they don’t exist. 

We live in Omelas. You may well have read Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which is often assigned by teachers. But if you haven’t, I suggest you do it, and if you have, it’s always worth a re-read. It’s short, and its core point is very simple. Spoilers follow.

Le Guin’s story has essentially three parts. First, she introduces us to a beautiful city having a delightful festival:

Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race.

The city, she explains, is a paradise. It is a place of peace, equality, and beauty. Its people “did without monarchy and slavery,” and “without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.” She asks you to imagine a perfect place. If you think it’s too boring, she says, then add an orgy and some drug taking. Whatever you need to picture Omelas as a land of contented, intelligent, prosperous people. 

Once Le Guin has enchanted us with this vision of Omelas, she explains to us that this wonderful utopia has a dark side. Somewhere in it a child is held in captivity, tortured and starved. The child is kept in a windowless closet. It pleads to be released, but its captors do nothing: 

“I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

But the tortured child isn’t being kept by some sadistic private citizen, a Josef Fritzl type. Everyone is aware of the child’s condition, but they are convinced (rightly or wrongly, it is not exactly clear) that the child’s suffering is necessary for their own happiness: 

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 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[…] They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.

In the third and final part of the story, once she has captivated us with this utopia and then disturbed us with its horrible crime, Le Guin tells us one more fact about the city. Most children who grow up there are at first disturbed by the fate of the tortured child, but eventually come to accept that its suffering is necessary. But some people, after seeing the child, do not go home to enjoy the festivals and the architecture. They quietly leave the city for good. They walk away. And while it’s not clear where they are heading, “they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Le Guin’s short story is often discussed as a parable about utilitarianism, and teachers often use it to spark debates about morality. She was inspired by William James’ hypothetical description of a situation where “millions [of people could be] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture.” James concluded that this would be unconscionable, that “even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.” Dostoevsky similarly raised the question of what it would mean if we could achieve peace and happiness but it would require us to “torture just one single creature.” We can pose all kinds of other complicated hypotheticals to grapple with utilitarianism—see the endless variations on the trolley problem—where we have to do something that seems awful but that will serve the “greater good,” and we can ask what horrible means would be justified in the pursuit of what noble ends. 

But we don’t have to ask what would be justified, because in a very real sense those of us in the United States of America live in Omelas right now. One reason I’ve always been annoyed by the trolley problem is that it rarely gets connected to the real-world moral crises we face as beings here and now. We don’t have to propose a hypothetical trolley or a hypothetical dystopia, because each of us, every day, is tolerating the torture and killing of children as the price to be paid for living in a comfortable, rich society. The United States is one giant killer trolley, and you’re on it. (Not that the contemporary U.S. is anything like the paradise of Omelas. We make all of the grubby moral compromises without the benefit of getting an egalitarian utopia. Despite being a country of unprecedented wealth, the U.S. is a place filled internally with exploitation, poverty, violence, and misery. It’s only truly Omelas for the very rich, for whom it is a playground.) 

As I write, the people of Gaza are being deliberately starved. This is beyond dispute. Despite the Israeli government’s lies about the situation, the leading global hunger monitor has concluded that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” A surgeon in Gaza explained: 

Nothing has prepared me for the sheer horror I’m witnessing now: the weaponisation of starvation against an entire population. The malnutrition crisis has become catastrophic since my last visit. Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die, not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery. The surgical repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, then they die. It is happening repeatedly, and it is heartbreaking to watch. Four babies have died in the last few weeks in this hospital—not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation.

We know that this outcome is the result of purposeful policy. Israel’s own ministershave spoken of starvation in Gaza as a moral goal, one only thwarted by the international community. As a former State Department official explained last year, in the absence of pressure “you wouldn’t have had an iota of assistance” going into Gaza. When Israel increases aid it, it only ever does so in response to international pressure. “We bring in aid because there is no choice,” finance minister Bezalel Smotrich lamented. The majority of Jewish Israelis have long supported letting Gazans starve to death. And notably, the whole war on Gaza occurs in the context of a century-long effort to gradually destroy Palestine, in which Palestinian life and culture has been treated as virtually worthless. 

Even pro-Israel commentator Thomas Friedman has concluded that Israel has a “policy of starvation.” As famine expert Alex de Waal says, “since World War II there has been no case of famine as carefully planned and controlled as this one.” Israel’s own leading human rights organizations have concluded that a genocide is being carried out in Gaza. Israel has thwarted and destroyed the UN aid system, and imposed a fake aid system called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.” This “humanitarian” organization is a grotesque fraud. It has erected aid sites that are open only for brief periods, where hungry people en route are gunned down deliberately by IDF soldiers. (A surgeon who treated the victims commented: “it would appear to us that they’re—it’s almost like target practice—playing some sort of game, that we’re going to go for the head today, the abdomen tomorrow, the testicles the day after that. Truly, truly shocking.”) As a veteran Green Beret who went to work at one of the aid sites revealed: 

What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law. This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth… The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone... The sites were designed to lure, bait, aid and kill.

It is tempting to describe these as Israeli crimes, conducted by the wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. But that is not exactly right. They are U.S.-Israeli crimes. A Trump administration official has said that “the United States literally is the sole reason the state of Israel exists.” That’s only a slight exaggeration. The U.S. provides extensive military, diplomatic, and financial support to Israel. The U.S. backs Israel at the UN, vetoing binding Security Council resolutions that would require a ceasefire and hostage release. The U.S. helped Israel create the deadly “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which is partly staffed by U.S. contractors owned by U.S. investment companies. (These companies, incidentally, should be criminally investigated.) Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council observes that the “criminality” of the GHF “is funded by [the] U.S. government, by U.S. taxpayers.” Anthony Aguilar, the Green Beret whistleblower, says: 

What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland. We—we, the United States—are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza. For anyone who says that there is no starvation or mass hunger, or that not only are we at the precipice, but we have stepped over the line of wide-scale famine, to anyone who says that that’s not happening, shame on you.

And the children are not just starving. They are blown up, mangled, dismembered, shot in the head. They are having amputations without anesthetics. “All I could smell was children’s burning flesh,” said the global spokesperson for UNICEF, speaking of his visit. “There were burns on little girls and boys, fourth-degree burns I didn’t know existed. And shrapnel riddled through a body. Shrapnel is designed to go through cement, and what it does to a child’s body is horrific.” The acts being done to these kids are some of the worst things ever done by human beings to other human beings. They match the crimes of the most depraved abusers and psychopaths. I saw a Palestinian mother saying that her little son hadn’t been the same since he saw his sister’s head severed. I myself have been haunted for months on end by an image I saw—only briefly, but that was all it took—of a Palestinian child’s head with the face blown off. The image will be seared into my brain until I die. And I just saw one image for one second. The people of Gaza live this daily, dozens more killed every single day, drones flying overhead waiting to kill at random. Need I remind you once again that half the population of Gaza is children? Need I remind you that it has been bombed on the scale of Dresden? Do you realize the scale of the horror? Do you realize how far this depravity has gone, how little words can even begin to describe it? (For more, please read the interview I did with a surgeon who went to Gaza and treated children there, and bear in mind that this was from before the present famine.) 

The extent of U.S. responsibility is often obscured in the U.S. press. Consider a headline like “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel,” which suggests that the Trump administration is “frustrated” by Israeli actions. Or, from last year, “Why President Biden hasn’t been able to end Israel’s nearly year-old war in Gaza.” Such framings portray the U.S. as the classic “pitiful, helpless giant,” and Israel as being in the driver’s seat. But this is false. Israel is a tiny country and the United States is the global superpower. If it wished to change Israel’s behavior, it could deploy the tools it deploys against other weak nations it seeks to control. First, it could cut off aid. Then, if this did not achieve compliance, it could impose crippling sanctions. Finally, it could resort to the method it has deployed numerous times when the world’s small nations have displeased the superpower: forcible regime change. 

The fact that none of these methods are ever seriously considered means that the U.S. is not actually trying to change Israel’s behavior. It is trying to “distance itself” from a public relations catastrophe. But Joe Biden was always clear that he was not going to stop Israel from pursuing endless war against the people of Gaza, and Trump actually shares the Israeli right’s vision for the future of Gaza: a strip devoid of Palestinians, conquered and settled by Jewish Israelis and “redeveloped” (with Trump himself reaping handsome profits). He has been very open that his dream is ethnic cleansing, which means the Wall Street Journal is simply lying when it suggests “Washington” is “struggling to rein in” Israel. To struggle, one has to try. 

It is easy to be fooled when Donald Trump breaks with Netanyahu publicly and laments the starvation in Gaza. But Trump could end that starvation tomorrow, by simply threatening an escalating series of consequences if Israel does not allow full unrestricted access for aid. When U.S. presidents choose to dictate policy to Israel, they are listened to. Trump could have ended this the moment he got into office. Joe Biden could have prevented this entire situation. Either president could have ended the war overnight, at any moment, by imposing ceasefire terms on Israel. They made a choice.

The extent of American responsibility is important, because it clarifies our relationship to the children of Gaza. We pay for the killing of these kids. It comes out of your paycheck and mine. “Child murder fee” might as well be itemized on a receipt from the IRS. If you voted for Biden, you voted for this. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this. (Sorry, there wasn’t much of an alternative to voting for this, unless you voted for Cornel West.) 

So we live in Omelas. Except there it was only one child. Here it’s a million kids. And they’re not just held in captivity, but killed in the most painful and gruesome imaginable ways. 

What do we do with that knowledge? In Omelas, most people simply accepted it, on utilitarian grounds. If this makes our way of life possible, we can live with it. We’ll just make sure to think about it and not be under any illusions. That was their approach. Our society is actually much less defensible, because there’s not even a utilitarian argument to be made. Oh sure, some people say that unless Israel pummels the Palestinians to dust, Western civilization itself is under threat, and They Fight Them There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Here. But unless you’re truly under the spell of the most infantile racist propaganda, it’s impossible to believe that the starving babies of Gaza are a threat to anyone anywhere.

In Omelas, there were those that walked away. They were, we think (they didn’t speak), disgusted by the bargain they had made by living in their city. They couldn’t take it. They had to get out. But I don’t think they were defensible either. Le Guin doesn’t tell us that they should have walked away, just that they did. What they should have done, surely, before walking away, is try to save the child. Try to end the fucked-up system that gives comfort and abundance to the many, while torturing a few who are kept far away from sight. N.K. Jemisin, in a response to Le Guin’s story, concluded: “So don’t walk away. The child needs you, too, don’t you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless.”

When you confront the fact that you’re complicit in the torture of a child, what do you do? Well, for one example, we can look to the popular children’s educator Ms. Rachel. Ms. Rachel’s videos are the most wholesome things imaginable. She just loves kids. She helps them count. She teaches them words. She plays them songs. Her world is a pure, innocent, sweet world where kids get to be loved and silly and happy. 

Because Ms. Rachel is not a hypocrite, because she is sincere in her love of children, finding out she lived in Omelas has been devastating. She wants to live in the surface world of play and joy. But she cannot escape the truth that there is a dark world beneath the surface world, one where kids are maimed and destroyed using U.S. tax dollars. Ms. Rachel has not reacted to the revelation that she lives in Omelas by walking away. Instead, she has spoken out constantly for the children of Gaza. She has filmed videos with them. She has raised money for them. She has tried to use her limited power and influence, by refusing to work with anyone who has not spoken out about Gaza. Ms. Rachel has said that she finds it unconscionable when she sees celebrities and influencers remaining silent as Gaza is destroyed. She has what I think is the only humane reaction to the “Omelas revelation,” which is to say: How can we possibly let this continue for another second? How can anyone accept this? 

I see more people waking up to this now that Gaza is actually in a famine. For years, there were warnings that Israel was setting Gaza up to be destroyed. Norman Finkelstein wrote Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdomin 2018, and told this magazine that year that Israel had become “positively maniacal in its determination to crush the people of Gaza” and to place them in an “unlivable situation.” Plenty of people denied or ignored this at the time. Even now, with the reality of the genocide becoming undeniable, there are those that continue to avoid admitting the obvious. (In the New York Times this has resulted in absurdities, like op-eds denying the genocide while its brutal facts are laid out on the front page.) It is not too late for people to come around, to see through the myths and propaganda (“Hamas is stealing aid,” “the health ministry is exaggerating,” “the journalists are Hamas,” “we only fired warning shots,” etc.) But the crucial question is what you do with the brutal knowledge of the horrors that coexist with your comforts. Do you walk away? Or do you stay? The Palestine activists have, for nearly two years, stayed and fought, and they have been relentlessly persecuted and smeared because of it. But we need a movement ten times as large if we’re going to push the U.S. state into ending this horror and finally granting Palestinians their basic right of self-determination. 

Gaza is not the only way in which the world we live in is like Omelas. We live in a world of superficial images and appearances, and beneath those appearances is often something so terrible that it is very difficult to think about. We try not to think about where our food comes from, for instance. We don’t like to think about the brutalized laborers responsible for making all of our wonderful cheap products. We don’t like to think about where all our garbage goes, or the people dying in natural disasters because our leaders refuse to get off fossil fuels. We hide the carnage, as this exchange in Jack London’s The Iron Heel so vividly made clear in 1908: 

“The wild Indian is not so brutal and savage as the capitalist class,” he answered; and in that moment I hated him.

“You do not know us,” I answered. “We are not brutal and savage.”

“Prove it,” he challenged.

“How can I prove it . . . to you?” I was growing angry.

He shook his head. “I do not ask you to prove it to me. I ask you to prove it to yourself… I  understand you have money, or your father has, which is the same thing—money invested in the Sierra Mills.”

“What has that to do with it?” I cried.

“Nothing much,” he began slowly, “except that the gown you wear is stained with blood... The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me.”

The thing is, we find so many ways of drowning out the sound of the blood drip, drop, dripping all around us. As Norman Solomon explains inWar Made Invisible, all kinds of mythology and propaganda are built up in order to keep us from looking squarely into the eyes of those we victimize. It’s very easy to just enjoy the festivals and the television shows and pretend you can’t hear the terrified screams of Gazan children. But a morally responsible person will not do this. Like Ms. Rachel, they will not be able to be comfortable so long as others are being victimized. That’s the basic principle of solidarity (“while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”). And it’s the correct response to finding out you live in Omelas. You do not walk away. You stay. And then you figure out how to destroy the injustice that has made the society so grotesque and indefensible.