I feel your story misses the thing that made the original so painful, though—that the joy of the group is supposedly only possible and conceivable due to the suffering of the child, and the fact that the child wants out and begs for it and could be released, but is denied for the sake of the other members, as an active choice against its even most basic human rights:
Yes, I reject this part because I don’t think that we live in the least convenient possible world, where cities like Omelas can only be accepted or rejected, never gradually improved.
And so I wanted to ask: could this sort of suffering still happen in a world where things aren’t magic, where you can make incremental changes? And I think the answer is yes, for the reasons in the story—which I personally find much more poignant than the original.
On that point, we very much agree. Them walking out, for all its beauty of rejecting such a choice, always felt something of a cop-out to me—they aren’t actually dealing with the difficult situation, and they are leaving the kid behind in its misery. It’s one of the parts of left-wing thinking that has always bothered me, when people reach for revolutions or isolated communities as the solution when systemic incremental reforms are hard, disregarding how much harder revolutions are to pull of well, especially if you lack a precise idea of your goal, which, if you had it, you should also be able to work towards with reforms.
Yes, I reject this part because I don’t think that we live in the least convenient possible world, where cities like Omelas can only be accepted or rejected, never gradually improved.
And so I wanted to ask: could this sort of suffering still happen in a world where things aren’t magic, where you can make incremental changes? And I think the answer is yes, for the reasons in the story—which I personally find much more poignant than the original.
On that point, we very much agree. Them walking out, for all its beauty of rejecting such a choice, always felt something of a cop-out to me—they aren’t actually dealing with the difficult situation, and they are leaving the kid behind in its misery. It’s one of the parts of left-wing thinking that has always bothered me, when people reach for revolutions or isolated communities as the solution when systemic incremental reforms are hard, disregarding how much harder revolutions are to pull of well, especially if you lack a precise idea of your goal, which, if you had it, you should also be able to work towards with reforms.