December 20, 2023December 20, 2023 LeGuin, COVID, and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Once again, COVID-19 cases are on the rise. The sight of people wearing face masks in public, however, continues to be a rarity as most people insist that not wearing a mask is simply an expression of personal freedom. But what happens when choosing to exercise a personal freedom harms others? Long before COVID-19 existed, author Ursula K. LeGuin was considering a version of that question. SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (and to a lesser extent the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” ((TrekMovie reviewer Anthony Pascale described the Strange New Worlds episode as “a beat-for-beat recreation” of the LeGuin story.)) and numerous other TV, movies, and stories that riff on LeGuin’s original). You’ve been warned. In her 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. LeGuin provided a philosophical tale about the fictional city of Omelas. At first glance, Omelas appears to be a utopia, where every resident is happy and free from hunger or other suffering. The narrator describes a city... “How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naïve and happy children — though their children were in fact happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.” “[The people of Omelas possessed] boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer.” Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” But Omelas holds a dark secret. The city’s universal happiness is only possible by the citizens’ choice to keep one child locked in perpetual suffering and darkness. “In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. . . . In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes — the child has no understanding of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. ‘I will be good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’ They never answer.” Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Thus Omelas’ citizens lead happy lives, as long as they each choose to allow that single child to suffer. “Those are the terms,” LeGuin explained. ” If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.” Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Let me emphasize that: The citizens of Omelas actively choose to allow a child to experience continuous, horrible suffering, in exchange for each citizen being able to live the way they want. What does this have to do with COVID-19? As I am writing this, COVID-19 continues to infect and kill people in the United States, with approximately 22,000 new hospitalizations every week and over 1,200 weekly deaths ((COVID-19 numbers reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the week of December 2, 2023. CDC Data Link)). Yet the vast majority of Americans have chosen to behave as if COVID no longer exists. They have stopped masking in public. Roughly 93% no longer receive booster vaccinations for COVID-19 ((“2% of kids, 7% of adults have gotten the new COVID shots, US data show” — Associated Press, October 26, 2023)). To these Americans, COVID is in the past and now they choose to return to their happy, self-directed lives. And it’s not like their choice to live “normal” lives is somehow forcing some other individual to suffer (or die), right? Well... Approximately 3% of the adults in the US are immunocompromised ((Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) via PubMed, “Prevalence of Immunosuppression Among US Adults”)), meaning their bodies are less able (and in some case, completely unable) to fight infections. These immunocompromised individuals are more likely to become infected with COVID-19, be sicker for a longer period of time, require hospitalization, and ultimately have a higher risk of death due to COVID-19. So when everyone else stops taking precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (stops wearing masks in public, stops getting vaccinated, etc.), that directly increases the risk that immunocompromised individuals will become infected. From a practical perspective, this means that the choice by most Americans to stop masking in public has a severe negative impact on the lives of immunocompromised people. Those immunocompromised people no longer are safe going out in public because even if they wear a mask, most of those around them are not masked ((Bottom line — There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that masks work, but it also has been shown that masking is most effective when the infected individuals are masked.)). And that forces the 3% of immunocompromised Americans to make tough decisions; decisions like choosing between going to the grocery store or avoiding a potentially fatal infection. If you are one of the healthy majority who (probably) doesn’t have to worry about dying from COVID-19, lucky you. But your decision that you no longer care if you catch COVID-19 and then spread it to others impacts everyone. And in the case of the immunocompromised individuals infected thanks to your selfish “I don’t need to wear a mask” attitude, the impact of your decision may well be their death. (Just to reiterate, the US continues to have 1,200 people die EVERY WEEK due to COVID-19, while most people act as if the pandemic is over.) So America isn’t really that different from Omelas as imagined by LeGuin. The majority of Americans have chosen to return to their pre-COVID-19 lifestyles, knowing that a small number of Americans will continue to die as a result of those choices of the majority. Choices do have consequences, including consequences that affect others beyond the person making the choice. If I choose to drive my car on the sidewalk, my choice impacts the pedestrians I run over. And if I choose not to mask, that choice impacts the 1,200 Americas that will die from COVID-19 every week. Feature Photo Credit: Image by mdjaff on Freepik If this article inspires you to read Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” I also encourage you to read the N. K. Jemisin short story “Those Who Stay and Fight” ((“Those Who Stay and Fight” is reprinted by permission of the author in Lightspeed Magazine online. The story originally was published in the 2018 anthology How Long ’til Black Future Month?)), a direct response to LeGuin’s work. Footnotes: COVID-19 Science Fiction