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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Summary

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Stephanie Scott IDIS 302 Ethical Issues in Business and Society October 30, 2015 The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Summary In the story, Omelas is a utopian city of happiness and delight, whose inhabitants are smart and cultured. Everything the narrator describes of Omelas is exuberant, colorful, and great. Omelas is pure happiness except that isn’t true. The city has a terrible secret and the great prosperity of Omelas is centered on one child that has to live a life of everlasting unhappiness, despair, and squalor. The citizens are told of this secret upon their coming of age, so basically it’s their coming of age tale. …show more content…

However, those same people are eventually able to come to terms with this knowledge and decide to live their lives to the fullest somehow making them feel better that they are living a great life in spite of this child’s suffering. They figure they can at least make the child’s life worth living. However, a few of the citizens, regardless of their stage of life, make the decision to quietly separate from the city of Omelas and journey towards the unknown. This is something of a quiet protest. The story of Omelas ends by explaining the citizen’s journeys as an unimaginable place, but it’s only unimaginable for those who didn’t have the courage to allow the type of evil Omelas was enforcing by living happily within their lives and knowing there was a child living in the

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