A few days ago the Pharyngula blog had a thoughtful post on the child-molestation meltdown currently wracking the Catholic church. In discussing the faithful’s attempts to protect guilty priests at the expense of their victims, it drew a parallel with Ursula K. Le Guin’s beautifully depressing short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (which if you haven’t read, the text is here. Go read it right now. I’ll wait). It continued:

In the story, some few people reject the terms of the sacrifice, and this is where I have mixed feelings about it: they quietly leave the city, alone, to go somewhere else, somewhere they can’t even imagine. They are “the ones who walk away from Omelas,” after all. They are the ones who will not accept bliss if it’s founded on another’s pain.

But I don’t know, it doesn’t seem enough. The story seems to accept that there is an act that cannot be committed: that protest and tattling are not an option, that no one ever sees that there is a justice in bringing the oppressed to light and doing something. Or even questioning whether a child’s sacrifice is at all causal in bringing about their happiness. It’s a thoughtful story, but it needs a sequel, “The Ones Who Storm the Gates of Omelas”.

I (and many of the commenters on the site) thought that was a particularly moving idea and wanted to share it. As one of them commented, the willingness to give up one’s own life to save another’s is humanity’s greatest strength and most potent weapon.