The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas

Review on The Lottery
Among all the reading materials The Lottery is my favorite simply because it reminds me of Omelas. The author used a lot of foreshadowing in the story and made everyone in the town looked eased and indifferent about the lottery. In that part I particularly like it that the description of the activity takes up most words of the story then it narrows down slowly from all town folks a half dozen and then to one person without telling you what the lottery was for until it comes to a shocking end.

In The Lottery the town people had already grown numb about the tradition during which they randomly chose a person through ‘the lottery’ and stoned that person to death, regardless what the person and his/her family felt

But the one that gave me the deepest impression is Omelas in a short story called The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas. The story describes a utopic town where every townsman leads the most perfect life one could ever fancy. Everybody gets what they want and lives happily in the heaven-like town. However, under the city, there’s a filthy and chilly dungeon where a boy is chained and locked in the dark, having no proper clothes to wear and no proper food to eat. The people in Omelas all know about the boy and they all keep their mouths shut about it because the price to this blissful life is letting the boy rot underground and nobody is to offer help or even the slightest sense of sympathy. Nobody says a word or even wonders why about this unhuman treatment because one boy against the entire town, the math is obviously logical and

However, China’s population is reaching its limitation and so is the world’s. Our competent government is trusted to not let what happened in Omelas and The lottery fall on us. But if we should ever come to that, if such horrible thing does happen, can we still stay in a clear state of mind to criticize people for struggling to survive? Can we still be sane not to join in such monstrous conduct? Or can we still call it monstrous at all? Ethics and moral are the fundamental pillars that keep the house of civilization from falling apart. But as long as we are living in the house, we are in no position to judge the people in The Lottery and Omelas. Just like we are in no position to judge Chamberlain’s selfishness when we are not sitting in his chair. Just like we are no one to judge the Royalists and the Bonapartists in The Count of Monte Cristo when we are not living in their time. Some things are just inevitable when the civilized world runs its