The Ones Who Walked Away

If you haven't already read Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," I recommend that you do so to best contextualize this song. The story is more thought experiment than traditional narrative, exploring the question of an apparent utopia whose peace and prosperity is maintained through the suffering of a child. (And because people often ask me this: yes, I have read the well-known "response" to this story by N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," as well as the more recently published "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim. I recommend both of these stories as well.) References and comparisons to this story have been quite frequent in my corner of the world for quite some time, with the obvious parallels between the fictional Omelas and our own society and politics being easy to draw and difficult to deny. However, when I started to write this song, my main line of thinking wasn't political.

For almost two decades now, most of my live performances and my other musical activity has taken place at fan-run science fiction conventions. In that time, virtually every convention I attend has weathered some form of controversy due to someone being harmed by the actions or inactions of a participant or organizer. (This isn't unique to SF fandom, of course - humans are imperfect and it's inevitable that we will hurt each other through our mistakes. I've seen this same pattern play out in religious institutions, hobby meet-ups, friend groups, and elsewhere.) In almost all of these cases, as the truth came out and lines were drawn, I found myself on the receiving end of an ultimatum (whether explicitly stated or implied): The institution you align yourself with has harmed me. Anyone who remains a part of it is saying they're okay with how I've been harmed. Walk away, or be complicit. You have no other choice.

I sat with these questions for a long time. If I continue to give my time and money and effort to these organizations, am I just condoning and excusing the mistakes they've made? The conclusion I ultimately arrived at for myself was that this would only be true if I didn't do everything I could to correct the wrongs that had been done while I continued to participate. Walking away might have felt satisfying in the moment, but it would also mean giving up any power or influence I had over where that organization went in the future. It would mean admitting that I no longer found anything of value or anything worth preserving there, and I simply couldn't make myself believe that. When confronted with the flaws of an institution that meant a lot to me, I chose to double down, to invest more of myself in what I found worthwhile and to work to improve it. I'm not saying that people should stay in abusive circumstances or that no one should ever leave a place where they are no longer respected or supported; I have walked away when I no longer believed a situation was salvageable and I would never fault anyone for choosing to do the same. But when I chose to view my communities as flawed but worth my effort to improve, and not to consider them disposable even when they let me down, a lot of things shifted in my heart and mind, in ways that influenced how I approached the larger world as well.

(Okay. This is where the song gets harder to talk about, because I know there are people I care deeply about who really don't agree with me about this and who will be angry and sad and disappointed to read what I have to say. But it feels wrong to keep singing this song without being honest about what's behind it, so here we go.)

Pictured: a tiny fraction of the thousands of postcards to potential voters my husband wrote in 2020. Please vote, not only in the upcoming 2024 presidential-year elections, but in every election in the place where you live, every time where you can, voting for the people who are most likely to ensure there will be another election for you to vote in. Disengagement with the democratic process, and an unwillingness to use voting as one strategic tool in a multifaceted toolbox out of some misguided pursuit of moral purity, is one of the places where I most clearly see a lot of people trying to walk away from a battle they could be fighting and winning. Voting isn’t the only thing anyone can or should do to promote change, but fascists wouldn’t be trying so hard to prevent you from doing it if it didn’t actually matter.

I think that very few systems of any kind start out as an attempt to deliberately do as much harm as they can to as many people as they can. In fact, many of our current systems are a response to earlier structures that were arguably doing even worse harm to even more people. (For example, anyone who's paying attention can see that our justice system does not actually provide justice in far too many cases. However, the thing that it replaced was not a utopian ideal of shared accountability and rehabilitation. The thing that it replaced was vigilantism, which was arguably even less successful in providing justice.) It is my belief in this slow and gradual process of improving complex systems over long periods of time that makes me reluctant to endorse any worldview that espouses burning everything down and starting over from scratch. Having considered the evidence in front of me, I still believe it's wiser to iterate on pre-existing foundations and try to preserve the elements of our current systems that have improved on the strategies that have already been tried and deemed wanting.

Similarly, outside of fiction, it's rare for anyone to craft their worldview with the express purpose of becoming as evil as possible. Nor is every foundational disagreement between people the result of ignorance on the other person's part. It is entirely possible for two people to take in the same set of facts and still disagree about what those facts mean and what should be done about them. (To take an example from something I did walk away from: I've heard some Christians insist that the only reason anyone would ever leave the church is that they haven't read or understood the Bible. I'd hope it would be abundantly clear to all of us that this is not the case, and that in fact many people who left Christianity spent quite a long time reading and trying to understand the Bible before they did so. They simply didn't agree with what it had to say.) Certainly it is possible for someone to have formed their opinion based on ignorance or misinformation, but I believe it is dangerous as well as condescending to react to any difference of opinion from the stance that the only reason someone could possibly disagree with you is that they haven't been exposed to the right information yet.

This is also why I bristle instinctively at statements like "if there are nine bigots at a table and you sit down with them, now there are ten bigots at the table." Probably that's true if the nine other people at the table are the resurrected members of the Nazi high command. But when the nine other people are your family members or your old friends, who loved you and still say they love you even as they behave in ways that fail to demonstrate that love, doing the right thing becomes a lot more complicated. I wrote about this when I talked about "Heal" too but I think it's worth repeating: If you care about someone who has gone down a dark path and you want to help them turn away from it, holding them at arm's length won't get you very far. (How persuasive do you find it when strangers ring your doorbell asking you to convert to a religion you don't share?) Holding a door open for them to walk through in their own time as you remain present for them in a way that doesn't transgress your own boundaries is, in my experience, often much more effective. It can also look very much like complicity or burying your head in the sand to people who draw their own lines in a different place. But as much as I've tried to convince myself that walking away is the only moral and ethical response to immoral and unethical people and institutions, I can't make myself believe it - hence this song.

Again, I want to reiterate that no one should feel compelled to stay in a situation that's abusive or harmful. But I believe that what is true about institutions is also true about relationships: When you walk away, you give up your power to influence them to change for the better. And if we decide that no one who expresses a bigoted viewpoint is ever capable of change, and that anyone who sits down with such people to present an alternate viewpoint is a traitor who is just as bad as those irredeemable bigots, and we can't allow any bigots anywhere near our perfected society under any circumstances, but we can't change them either…

Well. Think that thought all the way through to the end. Take all the time you need.

"The Ones Who Walked Away" is, of course, a warning and an admonition to myself just as much as it is to anyone else - maybe more so. Revolutionaries and reformers both have an important role to play in the work that must be done to create real and lasting change. An approach that I personally don't understand often stems from sustained and clear-headed engagement with the same facts I know to be true. The difference isn't so much in what we believe as it is in how we've chosen to respond to our own deeply-held beliefs. There is so much work that needs to be done to remake our world into something fairer and more just that there is room for many different people to take many different approaches. I shouldn't discount the approaches of others when they come from that place of careful consideration (and why should I assume that they don't?), but I also shouldn't let myself fall into the trap of believing that my own approach is necessarily wrong because it differs from approaches taken by those around me. All I can do is the best I can do from the perspective I view it from, and be ready and open to the possibility of changing my mind and my actions if the available evidence suggests that I should.

At least, that's what I tell myself.