Walk Away: Reflections on “Omelas” and Growing up During the Cold War

Editorial: Walk Away

Lezlie A. Kinyon, Ph.D. Ed.

September, 2016

Vol. 5 Number 2: Women in War: Spirit, Body, Mind, Heart, Art

       This past spring I attended a commencement at a large university. It was the usual affair with long-winded faculty, a longer-winded keynote, happy grads and proud families. Lots of photos and smiles.

      At lunch, after the ceremonies, we exchanged memories and anecdotes about “our” grad: a long-time friend and, now, a colleague in the human sciences. As the day went along, I began to consider my own studies and, later, as the conversation spun down, my words and work here, in this journal.

      While Coreopsis is primarily an arts publication, with an emphasis on the performing arts, it does have a social agenda. Our umbrella organization, the Society for Ritual Arts (SRA), has a stated goal of, among other priorities, supporting artist-scholars under difficult circumstances, specifically, those who are committed to creating change while addressing the challenges we all face: climate change and environmental crises, human rights abuses, the freeing of women under repressive regimes and exploitative social “norms,” and working toward full realization of freedom of thought and expression by all people, everywhere. Many of the scholars published between these “pages” are working within the “traditional” boundaries of scholarship in their respective fields. Some are interdisciplinary in approach, and a few are unlettered, working artists whom we wished to mentor. All are involved in research that engenders unique contributions to scholarship.

      What all of these writers have in common, be it a study on shamanic experience, earth sciences, gender studies, mythic lore, history, literature, theology, or music, is that commitment to social change.

Let me back up.

      In my undergraduate years (back in the far reaches of time) I read a short tale. It was contained in a collection of tales by author Ursula K. Le Guin (an artist-scholar of note in her own right). This tale was called “Those who Walk Away from Omelas”. This tale has become a standard teaching text in sociology courses, cited as an example of scapegoating. It is a tale of Omelas, ‘the perfect, shining city’ and what price the denizens of the city of Omelas are prepared to pay for life in the perfect city. Every citizen knows, and has witnessed, the price paid. Most are willing to ignore the truth and pay the price. The sacrifice of one for the good of all. Many other fantasy and science fiction writers have also explored this theme, but none so poignantly as Ms. Le Guin in her terse, lyrical, descriptive prose.  In a few short pages she takes us from the festive, happy streets where friends laugh, lovers hold one another, and families revel in the joy of each other to a dark, dirty basement room where a secret is found. Where the price for the bright sunny, well-ordered, peaceful streets is paid. Now and forever. With no respite or hope for change.

      Outside the city of Omelas is darkness, perhaps a wilderness, Le Guin does not describe the road away, nor can she: it is “beyond” and unknown. Some few, unable to pay the price for the city’s perfection, walk away. It is an act of infinite courage: there is no return, no slipping back into happy ignorance: only the path forward, into the unknown.

She seems to register what is strange about this place. But she cannot describe what lies beyond, in “the darkness” outside of  Omelas, because each person there must make her own way. … As readers, Le Guin provides us with the building blocks to construct the city of Omelas, but if we want to forsake it afterward, then we too have to strike out alone. (DeGraff, 2015. pp. 121)

      Outside of Omelas is the world, where nothing is ever perfect, but where freedom may be found.

The writers in this issue, each in a unique way, have walked away from Omelas. Beyond that, each has returned to the gates and called for the awakening and, ultimately, the freedom of those who dwell within. The act of seeing past the illusion, to end the dream that “perfection” is possible. To refuse to pay the price for living in a dream of perfection while shutting out truth. To ask – no, demand – the freedom to think, act, and to create as her or his intellect and heart lead.

      To call for the opening of the gates of Omelas, the perfect, shining city, and face the cost of that city, for while that basement exists with its terrible secret, so does the world without. A world shut out, unexplored, and ignored. This is the choice of all the human peoples of the Earth: to find the deepest meaning of freedom. To stumble, to fall, to be hurt, to fulfill expectations, to fail abysmally and to succeed brilliantly. It is the birthright of all humans to live without fear: of repressive regimes and ideologies or the chains of “tradition” and social norms that proclaim patriarchal interpretations of – often – mystical revelations as being the only interpretation. An interpretation that, all too often, with the hubris of religious conviction (however wrong) leads to the de-humanizing culture of war and the imprisonment of free-thinkers, artists and scholars, and, in particular, the chaining, enslavement, maiming in spirit and body, and the death of women and girls in the name of morality, religion, and that all-encompassing excuse of thought-killers everywhere: tradition.

      To walk away from Omelas is to walk away from everything one has ever known, to leave all behind, including the comfort of illusion and expectations, and simply walk forward: through the gates into what lays beyond, for good and ill. For some few, knowing the cost of illusion within and what lies without the city gates, it also means knowing the moment, and possessing the wisdom and the courage to return with his or her gifts of unknown things.

I, too, walked away. Here is part of my story. I am not sure if I have ever returned or have attained the wisdom to know.

We Believed That We Were Free.

     Growing up in a time of unprecedented wealth and economic growth in the US left me with an odd view of the world. While it is also true that the economic “bubble” began to break in my teens with the fading of the post-World War II boom and the beginning of the post-Viet Nam recession, as my daughter once put it: I remember a time when things worked. The trash was picked up, the streetlights came on at dusk and off at dawn. The potholes on the freeways simply did not exist. In fact, the freeways of the West Coast were completed during my childhood and were shiny and new. Much like the houses we lived in and the schools I attended in the suburbs of Seattle. The people in my neighborhood were mostly white, more Asian families than one would expect given the times, and a number of mixed Native American and white families. They were military and former military, housewives, teachers, college professors, small business people, doctors, nurses, lawyers, librarians, blue collar workers and aerospace engineers; all of whom owned their bungalows and set about raising families with Sunday dinners, backyard BBQs and picnics at “the lake” in summer, a movie on Saturday, and the yearly vacation to the mountains or the ocean, or, if really lucky, to far off Disneyland by airplane. Thanks to that economic boom, fueled by Boeing, Lockheed and the industries surrounding aerospace, they could afford to do so. The suburbs that Boeing built, and when Boeing and Lockheed both shut down major manufacturing in the early 1970s, the suburbs that aerospace emptied as families moved away.

That was the way of the world. I never met a black family, never heard Spanish (although I did hear Japanese), did not know what “gay” or “transsexual” was (or, even the possibility of such) until I was much older and had moved very far away. What I knew was the wide salt sea, the tall evergreens, the wild flowers, the back yard, and the friends I had at school. My parents, as so many of that time and place, had closed all the doors and windows and threw away the keys long before I was born: at the end of a terrible war that defined a generation, marked the end of an age, and the beginning of a long, exhausted, sleep.

      We believed ourselves to be the free citizens of the best nation in the most beautiful – and, blessed – region of that country on the planet Earth.

This is an observation about childhood and the Cold War.

      If we, the suburban post-war boom babies, thought – or, worse – expressed out loud anything that seemed contrary to the idea that we lived in the very best, most free, wealthiest nation on the Earth, the adults in our lives quickly disabused us of this idea: They brought up Moscow. A place, in my childhood imagination, dreary with endless overcast skies thick with snow. Snow-covered and gray, with grayer people swathed in darker colors against the cold, furtively going about their business in terror of the secret police. A place where basements held prisons where unspeakable things went on and no one – ever – had a free thought, sang, danced, had enough to eat, or could read a book that had not been censored. Except, of course, for the ballet. I was (and remain) a great fan of the ballet. In my childish vision of Cold War Moscow, the ballet was where life, color, beauty live in the form of athletic and graceful dancers forever enmeshed in the glorious music of those Russian composers.

      It was, overall, an eggshell existence: like a Russian Pysanky egg, covered on the outside with color and life; dead, dry, crumbled into dust on the inside where life had once been. More fragile than glass, less permanent than a note sung in a snowstorm.

      There was a crack in the eggshell: Tar balls on the otherwise pristine Pacific beaches, clear-cut forests, whale blood on the waters, washing ashore until there were only a very few voices in the deep. … and, a pair of red buttons that everyone knew that two men had their fingers on. Power lines that, if you followed them, led to old Nike Sites where men prepared for our future after that button had been pushed: it was 4 minutes to midnight.

      Meanwhile, my days were full of school, friends, and long summers with overcast, rainy Seattle skies interspersed by sunny days made for beaches or camping in the mountains. Things that seem so normal then I know in retrospect were those ever widening cracks: tar remover was as essential for beach days as a towel and “suntan lotion.” Tar remover to take off the oil globs from our feet that washed in from offshore drilling. Tanning lotion: an oily tube to enhance that all-important “healthy summer tan.” No actual dark-skinned people were discussed.

And then it was 1968. Riots. Tear gas. The deaths that followed a decade of the civil rights movement and “bringing the war home.” Kent State. Chicago. Death everywhere: body bags, assassinations of political, inspirational, and – saddest of all – musical heroes.

Still, we believed ourselves free.

      Lurking, always, was the legacy of the Cold War and the lingering House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisting. Communists under the bed. Parents turning away as the largest generation of the 20th century turned away, rejected it all – wholesale – envisioning a different future. I was the tail end of the post war “Boom.” Pundits of the succeeding generations will say that this or that event defined the era: Woodstock or the lunar landing, or the assassination of Martin Luther King. They are all right, and, all dreadfully wrong: it was the non-war in Viet Nam and the legacy of the Cold War that defined all that followed. It was the depth of the lies and manipulations, the power plays and the horrific inheritance of those things that still define us, today: nuclear weaponry, cleaned up and sanitized as “weapons of mass destruction.” Yesterday, when I was a child, it was four minutes to midnight, then three, and now, two.

      In many households there was vial of capsules at the back of the bathroom cabinet. One for each member of the household, plus one. When a certain call came, the man of the house (and it was nearly always a man) left to meet a car that would take him away until “the crisis was over.” Everyone else had 15 minutes to a half hour to reach a fallout shelter. If one failed to reach the shelter: swallow the capsule. The children were told that we would sleep until it was all over.

      These were the men, the generation, that fought fascism and Hitler. They were indoctrinated in military obedience imbued with a deep sense of duty. They, even having come out of a bitter, terrible war that had left many millions dead, dying, or refugees, were willing to kill everyone and everything on a magnificent scale in order to maintain the fiction of something they only thought they had:

We believed ourselves to be free.

      In 2016, we live with this legacy every day, every hour, with every breath. And, yet, even now, there is a distant vision hard to grasp or fully realize. A belief in what could be. This issue of Coreopsis is conceived as an envisioning of that way, that place where we could be, where we desperately want to be: when the gates of Omelas are truly open, and we are free.

      In especial, the women and girls of the world.

I am left with these questions, at the end of this editorial:

Do we, can we, really know what that world will look like when we, all of us, are free?

and:

What does that word “freedom” truly mean?

      Truthfully, I cannot answer these questions, neither for myself, nor in a theoretical sense. I can dream, envision, work toward that end but, enmeshed in my generation, my time and place, I can only dimly see that world. It is a new thing. It has never happened in our history as a species. We must invent it and know ourselves to be free.

     To do that, we must turn away from here, we must walk away into the wilderness, and some us must return with what we have learned to invent ourselves anew.

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. – (Le Guin, 1973, p. 284)

References

DeGraff, A. (2015). Plotted: A literary atlas. Zest Books: San Francisco, CA. p. 121

Le Guin, U. (1973/1975) The ones who walk away From Omelas. In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.

Harper Perennial: New York