I'm nearing critical 'Read another book' saturation with Omelas

We need to get comfortable talking about complicated and scary things without the thin scrim of metaphors our parents used to introduce school kids to talking about complicated and scary things.

I once read a statement that went something like this: 'I don't believe good art can radicalize you. I believe it can plant seeds that can awaken you to radicalizing events in reality.' And I don't know how radicalized anyone can really be if we just keep litigating the case of a made-up kid in a made-up hole over and over and over and over again. We're not even making up our own metaphors for kids anymore. It's pathetic.

Way Back When, in 2016-2021, there existed a phrase that I've watched vanish alongside Twitter's ill-earned reputation as a hotbed of cultural conversation: "Read another book." Though there's been some historical revision around the phrase framing it as a specific 'We always knew she was actually bad,' disgust at Harry Potter, the aggravation behind it was more generally about adults who were unable to disentangle their conversations about real world catastrophes from the metaphorical language of pop culture for middle schoolers. I worry that we lost the overall criticism in the phrase when we got sideswiped by Joanne's hard swerve into bigotry, and a lot of people telling Potterheads to read another (factual) book just found a different and more prestigious 8th grade horse to bludgeon unto death.

Talking about the Omelas kid is the thinking poster's version of talking about Severus Snape. It's mean to say that, but it's not wrong.

And this isn't to say it's always dumb and bad to use a cultural shorthand for iconographic purposes - I found out about the yellow vest protests in France because I was browsing a French-language hashtag for an anime that
1. Is very beloved in Francophone nations
2. Has a certain anarchistic, flag-torching relevance 
and several people had tagged their... 'interactions' with traffic cameras with that hashtag. Stuff's allowed to have resonance with people, but I think it's important that this is an instance of self expression alongside the very real act of disabling a component of the surveillance state. I would have nothing but respect for someone who monkeywrenched a pipeline operation and left the one-line manifesto "This one's for the kid in the hole," but we're not doing that when we talk about the made-up kid in the made-up hole.

I don't think we're creating material change when we just keep iterating on fanfiction about a short story that's confidently taught to pubescent kids with above-average reading comprehension. I don't think we're even always making good art. Damn, I've read a lot of these fanfics and I haven't enjoyed or felt surprise at any of them. We're not even finding better art. Le Guin credits Dostoevsky among the inspirations for the central conceit of the piece, but we're not going out and buying bilingual editions of those excellent works upon which this fucking expanded thought experiment is built, we're yanking our hogs writing fanfiction about the thought experiment.

'Ohhh yankity yank yank what if in Omelas we could have SOCIAL MEDIA WARS about the made-up kid in the made-up hole?'

Three Palestinian kids got shot up in my city, my sweet little Keep Vermont Weird UWU You ARE Welcome Here In This House We Believe city not very many weeks before I was assailed by another goddamn splat on the viewing booth wall about this goddamn kid in this goddamn hole. What the fuck are you doing??

I'd be less upset if it was new ideas, new metaphors expressing the emotional reality of real problems the writers care about, but it's not. It's just a re-litigation of the same thought experiment through the medium of self-congratulatory fanfiction over and over and it sucks. It sucks, and it's exhausting because Harry Potter has fallen out of favor for learn-ed progressive types and it's just been supplanted by another piece of prose that can be processed without issue by an 8th grader. You can kill the kid in the closet under the stairs but he'll just be replaced by another ironically child-appropriate analogy for injustice.

For the record, I was assigned to read Omelas as part of a 'leadership' class and destroyed the entire class discussion portion of the lesson plan by saying, in the deep South, in 2005, that to commit to affecting social change in Omelas would mean becoming a terrorist.

I'm going to my library for some Dostoevsky shit tomorrow. Fuck y'all.