"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

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. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

Reform is not the answer

Prompt #3461

"Oh, something goes missing and you immediately blame the ex-thief? Real classy. Definitely makes me want to keep busting my ass to reform.”

鍵置き・小物置き用カウンターを余った無垢のフローリング材を利用して取り付けてもらいました♪

脚の部分は手摺としても利用できます。

◾️re.haus-sy◾️

兵庫県神戸市須磨区

reform and abolition checklist created by dean spade, activist, writer, teacher and author of normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics and mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next)

Applicants crowd around a stage in a Bowery theater in hopes of being chosen by the Bowery Comeback Association for a chance to start life anew, January 26, 1948. The association announced a plan whereby it would give one man each month a chance to climb back to respectability by providing new clothing, a shave, a haircut, a decent hotel room, and spending money to help him find work.

Photo: Joe Caneva for the AP

Today is Yom Kippur

Shout out to all the queer Jews who have to explain this holiday to their queer friends.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who have friends that respond with laughter, or calling fasting child abuse, or asking why you even bother.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who feel conflicted over this holiday.

Shout out to all the queer Jews forced to participate (you deserve to make your own choices).

Shout out to all the queer Jews who are in traditional communities, and will read in tomorrow's torah reading that being queer is wrong

Shout out to all the queer Jews who feel the need to repent for their queerness (you are perfect the way you are).

Shout out to all the queer Jews who are tired of lying, and tired of repenting for lying.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who can only think of all the times and all the people they are lying to every time they read Al Chet (על חטא)

Shout out to all the queer Jews who think of how many less sins they'd commit if only they weren't queer.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who do not feel safe today.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who do not know if or when they will ever feel safe on Yom Kippur.

You are all accepted here. You deserve a voice. My DMs are open if you need someone to talk to. This holiday can be challenging, but you will make it through.

Participating in reform movements is still essential, both to making life livable for people on a daily basis and to radicalizing people. It’s how people become revolutionaries. I’ve said many times: No one is born a revolutionary. Often when people radicalize to the Left, it is through a kind of constant disappointment with the inability or ineptness of the status quo, the existing system, its political representatives to deliver those things which do make life livable. The Great Depression really broke the common-sense notion that people were poor because there was something wrong with them. That laid the ground for the kind of mass radicalization of people to become workplace militants, Socialists, Communists. The question for organizers, or people who are part of socialist organizations, or who see themselves as part of the Left, is to try to generalize beyond a particular struggle that people are in. To generalize to show that this is not just about abortion, or the price of rent, or the price of groceries or just about climate, but how all of these things are connected to a system of capitalism that is dependent on the exploitation of human beings, of animals, of the Earth itself. And that is incompatible with human life, or with life at all. Sometimes you need not just action, but people with a social theory of how the world actually functions, and an alternative.

Public education is not actually about academia, it's about industry. The purpose of american schools, from day one, was to integrate members of the general people into a society that is nigh dependant on submission to the status quo. If you ask any teacher, student, parent, counselor, or any other person who is invested in public schooling, what the purpose of going to school is, they will respond with some variation on how it's meant to prepare kids for their future careers. What's important is not that one is in touch with their history, or able to perform basic mathematics, or that one can engage with literature and art in a meaningful way. The important part is that schoolchildren have a dispassionately earnest work ethic, an unyieldingly flexible standard of punctuality, and an uncompromising set of inordinate values about properness drilled into them. I don't think it's funny or ironic that school settings are commonly compared to prisons, and I don't think education should have to exist to serve the purpose of monetary and political benefit to be considered worthy of investment. Until public education as an institution is no longer viewed as an extension of industry, intellectualism will never thrive and no number of foundational reworks of the system will be effective at remedying the underlying cause of dysfunction and corruption.

is it possible that the reform movement in the US is different than in the rest of the world?

US reform jews usually have a reputation that they do not keep kosher, don't go to shul, don't keep shabbat and are "lazy jews" (which i don't agree with, everyone should live their religion how they want to without being insulted or called lazy)

but is it true that american reform jews are less observant than reform jews in other countries? i'm just curious since i've come across statements like these a few times before

Today is Labor Day in America, and I wanna take a moment to highlight how Appalachian folk played a major role in the American Labor Movement all those years ago.

From August 21st to September 2nd, 1921, the Battle of Blair Mountain took place. It was the largest labor uprising in United States history. For those of you who don't know, coal mining is a major industry in the Appalachian mountains (and unfortunately, one that had taken a toll on both the locals and the environment), and has been since the late 1800s. Coal miners and their families were treated like garbage, between the industry enacting violence against these people to the unfair/low wages.

Take some time to read up on the history of coal mining in the Appalachian mountains, and further read up on the Battle of Blair mountain along with how coal mining has been affecting these mountains today.

Educational Links:

Coal Mining in Appalachia

What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American History

The Battle of Blair Mountain (History)

The Battle of Blair Mountain (National Park Services)

Mining the Mountains

What is mountaintop removal mining?

The Coal Mine Next Door: How the Deregulation of Mountaintop Removal Threatens Public Health

the Crystal Gems, hundreds of years post-Steven

アトリエ,玄関ホールの枝ものを入替えました♪

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