The events at Penn State, the indifference of our politicians to the plight of many citizens of our country, including children, and the 1% who have it all and want still more call to mind Ursula Le Guin's science fiction/horror story titled 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'.
My mind is a jumble about the connection, and my association is not even original, because I read John Scalzi's post on Omelas University on Facebook and immediately connected with it.
I think of the concept of the scapegoat, which is also not original, but comes from it's margaret.
I think that many of us here in the US and the West are culpable, because our comfortable lives depend upon the labor of a good many people, including children, who live desperate and sometimes violent lives in very poor countries.
See? My thoughts are far from coherent. They're scattered all over the place, and perhaps I'd have done better to leave them unwritten and hidden in my mind in their jumbled state. But LeGuin's story haunts me, so perhaps the post serves as a kind of exorcism.
If you haven't read the story and would like to, the link above will take you to the text.
Apropos of perhaps not much, I came across the following quote from Honoré de Balzac's novel Le Père Goriot. From Google Answers, here is the quote in its original French:
Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.An English translation:
The secret of a great fortune without an apparent source is a forgotten crime that has never been found out, because it was neatly done.Picture of William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat from Wikipedia.
