Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Everyone has those moments in life when something is going very wrong or isn’t going their way and wish they could blame it on someone else that isn’t involved or responsible doing these things. The concept of this is the basic definition of scapegoating. In the short story, by Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” he talks about a fiction town that is preforming one of the most extreme examples of scapegoating. In the case of the this town, they use a child as their way to scapegoat. They have put a child into a small cellar like room then neglect it and show it no sign of kindness so their entire city could never experience pain and have lifelong happiness for the rest of the population of the city. The idea of scapegoating

Le Guin even said that the city didn’t look like any normal city. The benefits of this example of scapegoating isn’t worth all of the different downfalls that came with it. Not only did they have to make a kid suffer in a cellar but it always made people suffer if they go see the child or even think of the concept of what they are doing. The point of using this scapegoat was to have lifelong happiness for everyone, but in the story the happiness of these people in the city had started to fade. When the children were finally an old enough age to understand the concept and were able to go see the baby most of them were terrified and mentally changed forever. The concept of a child their age suffering like that in completely unreasonable to them and they feel disgusted which they shouldn’t feel because they live in this city of happiness. There is people, children and adults, that after they go see the child that is suffering they could lose it and go silent. They would just start walking right of the city, they would walk straight out of the gates and go toward the surrounding mountains. They people would never be seen in the city ever again, it isn’t sure if they die or they just run away for ever but in either case that alone isn’t worth making one person suffer just for prosperity of a