In her classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes of a happy place known for a joyous Festival.
A cheerful sweetness hovers in the air of the magical Omelas, and it is reflected in the citizens.
“They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy…,” Le Guin writes. “They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. … They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.”
There was no monarchy, no stock exchange, no advertising, no soldiers, no clergy.
Le Guin asks readers to imagine beautiful nudes wandering about the Festival “offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and rapture of the flesh. …(L)et the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.”
Sounds very progressive.
After four pages of dwelling in the splendor of Omelas and the generous contentment of its people, Le Guin writes there is just one more thing to know. In a locked closet in a basement is a naked child that looks to be about six but is actually 10. The child is being tortured through neglect.
“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,” Le Guin writes. “Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there.”
The happiness of Omelas depends on this child’s misery. Often people are initially appalled and rail against the injustice. But eventually they rationalize that it’s for the best. The child is too degraded to understand joy. The people of Omelas aren’t free either. They endure this “terrible justice of reality” so they can enjoy all that Omelas has to offer.
Occasionally something that Le Guin calls “incredible” happens. Someone will look in on the child and doesn’t react by weeping or raging. They walk away – and keep walking “straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates.”
Le Guin’s story is known for igniting lively classroom discussions. To some people, the child represents poverty or the disenfranchised or prison. One convenient interpretation of Le Guin’s story is how the prosperous and happy use and need the poor and miserable. Often the people who walk away are regarded as heroic or at least of a higher moral character than those who stay and enjoy life in Omelas.
For me, there are no heroes in Omelas. The child being tormented is the victim of a crime. In Le Guin’s story, no one flings the door open, grabs the child and runs to safety. Merely walking away and leaving Omelas doesn’t help the child left behind.
The ones who walk silently away, depending on their circumstances, could even be accomplices to crime.
For instance, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. She has the power to ease crime victims’ suffering by using her position to protect others from ending up in that locked closet. Instead, she walks away.
Worse, she celebrates those who have caused pain – even death – to others. In doing so, she creates a culture more accepting of crime. She rationalizes that the money spent on prisons can be better spent elsewhere, particularly since most violent crime victims come from the lower socio-economic classes. They are used to crime.
More than any governor in Oregon history, Brown has spent her final term in office giving the state’s prison inmates reason to cheer. She has been generous with her clemency, granting almost a thousand commutations leading to early release of murderers, rapists, armed robbers and assailants, career burglars and thieves.
“It is an act of mercy to free me,” said Sterling Cunio in what was dubbed a “poetry reading” at a Willamette University Clemency Panel Discussion on Nov. 12 – 11 days after he was released from Oregon State Penitentiary.
Brown had granted him clemency, and now he is on the lecture circuit in the company of Professor Aliza Kaplan of Lewis & Clark Law School. Kaplan is another one who has walked away from the victim in the locked closet.
When Cunio was one month shy of 17, he and 18-year-old Wilford Hill kidnapped, robbed and murdered Bridget Camber, 18, and her fiancé, Ian Dahl, 21. He was kissing Camber good night in the parking lot of his Salem, Ore., apartment when Cunio and Hill struck.
Hill remains in prison. Cunio was a star inmate who won writing awards and fellowships and was embraced as a friend by University of Oregon Journalism Professor Lauren Kessler. While in prison, he created a substantial Internet presence.
Check out his YouTube performance at the penitentiary in 2014 called “We Will Win.” He starts off his poetry reading with a howl and announces “I make a motion to veto the judge … Judge rip up your score cards please.”
He rails, “As long as we are the number one nation of incarceration” then strings together myriad progressive causes – the dangers of Monsanto and Citizens United, profits over people, climate change, LGBTQ rights, free health care, the hazards of oil fracking, reverence for life.
“As long as we victimize communities with criminality, we lose. … We will win when we love everybody,” he concludes.
Cunio will tell you he is remorseful. However, he pushed for years to get out of prison early, making a mockery of his sentence and adding pain to the families of Ian Dahl and Bridget Camber.
Cunio will tell you he is not the same person who killed, robbed and kidnapped. I’m sure he isn’t.
However, he is now dangerous in a more profound way. He wants society to accept guys like the one he used to be. While still in prison, he was one of the inmates who advocated for Senate Bill 1008, which passed in 2019 and allows violent juveniles to avoid serious punishment.
If Cunio were honest, he would tell the truth that women like Brown, Kaplan and Kessler don’t want to hear: Punishment works. Had he been seriously punished when he started getting into trouble at age 14, he would not have been free to work his way up to aggravated murder at 16.
Brown, Kaplan and Kessler cling to the belief that teenagers’ brains are undeveloped and are capable of rehabilitation. Thus, juveniles who commit even the worst crimes deserve compassion and second chances.
Brown, Kaplan and Kessler have it backwards. Rehabilitating violent juveniles after the fact won’t help their victims. When juveniles start committing serious crimes against other people, they need serious intervention – including incarceration – until their brains have developed. Prison helped make Cunio who he is today, but it came too late to save his victims.
There will always be violent juveniles, but the newer and weaker laws will make it even more difficult to treat them. Three months after Brown signed SB 1008 into law, three teenage boys – younger than Cunio was when he killed – were arrested in the murder of 65-year-old Ricky Malone Sr., who was collecting cans in the St. Johns neighborhood. He was killed by a single shotgun blast to the chest.
Aaron Criswell, 15 at the time, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, though under SB 1008 he will be freed by his 25th birthday. Eugene Woodruff, 14, and Richard Rand IV, 15, were also sentenced to 20 years each.
As The Oregonian dutifully noted, “Because of juvenile sentencing laws, none of the three will serve their full sentences.”
Not noted: The Oregonian editorialized in favor of SB 1008. Editor Therese Bottomly and Editorial Page Editor Helen Jung are two more women who have walked away from the real victims.
More recently, and now almost routinely, Portland police dealt with gangs of teenage carjackers. Some of them were armed and some engaged in trickery to get drivers out of their cars. They didn’t hesitate to operate boldly in broad daylight.
Why shouldn’t they?
At one point, police arrested three boys ages 11, 15 and 17. The youngest had a gun, but police couldn’t keep him in custody because of his age. The same kid was arrested again in Marion County after police found him with a group of teens in a stolen car that contained guns and drugs.
Perhaps Cunio, now 44, will get a chance to meet his youthful alter ego at the business end of a gun. It could give him some fresh material for his “poetry readings.”
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
Crime, Punishment and Fellowships
Shredding the Public Safety Net
Nurturing Our ‘Freddy Kruegers’
At least a double.
Since Le Guin intended for OMELAS to be an anagram for Salem, how incredibly appropriate.
Your interpretation is exactly like how I came to be a prosecutor, As a kid I snuck episodes of THE DEFENDER, a socially conscious TV show about defense lawyers. They often lost, but 5hey defended the poor and helpless.
I decided that’s what I wanted to do when I gre up.
Until I went to college and discovered that, like the nameless child of Omelas, the poor and the helpless were not the criminal defendants, but their victims.
Chilling, and beautifully written.
Welcome back. I figured you finally had enough of Ripoff City and moved.
Our friends at DOC will tell you all the “adults in custody” as they’re called will get out someday so you need to repair them and return them. It might help if Cunio and his kind didn’t brag about their “accomplishments.”
Cunio needs to do what Alec Baldwin should do. STFU and go away.
I’ve been busy with work. Also, I write occasionally for Portland Dissent on Substack at https://portlanddissent.substack.com/
Baldwin is trying to save his career. Cunio is building his.
https://neveryetmelted.com/2021/12/09/an-unprecedented-degringolade/
“(T)he folly and decline of no previous known people, state, or culture has ever featured anything like the same levels of irrationality, self-hatred, and elite treason as our own.”
The speed at which it is all happening is hard to fathom. Folks who think they will come out on top will likely be surprised.
“They walk away – and keep walking” This is the 2021 equivalent of raising a fist in defiance… snapping a photo and then tweeting about it on an iPhone using the Verizon network.
America has long been a youth obsessed society. It benefits us in our willingness to accept the new, to assimilate willing immigrants, to create the new rather than just accept it.
I say this to offer evidence the sky is not falling, but I wrestle with the feeling that it is. Is this my middle agedness closing in or is this appreciably different and dangerous? I know what my Oregon State student daughter would say. I trust her, but she’s still so young…
“one must have a heart of stone to ….”