Ethics and psychomyth: US version.

If anyone has read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, have you applied it to the contemporary US?  Here is a plot summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

Give it an eye.  For whatever (surely complex) reason I am compelled to compare this story to our lives in the United States.  This is the instinct that lends an ear to those who criticize the US and the USs foreign policy.  Well, and domestic policy at that.  At an extreme these voices say the US had 9/11 coming.  I know, that goes a little too far.  But I see the metaphor that they are takings to the limits: some of the stuff the US does, in the name of its citizens occasionally, does harm others.  So can we turn this metaphor into a psychomyth, as Ursula describes her tale?

            Who is the child kept in filth?  In our world who stands in for this metaphorical child?  Well, as critics (whom I’m hiding behind) say, there are numerous actual real children in our world.  But these, as many real things do, become immaterial in a way.  No government official goes around and imprisons children then reports back to us that that is our toll.  Nothing so blatant in our country or outside of it.  To critique the critics, you have to regard it as a matter of perspective, to say that any country has been a victim of our policies.  We supported the Contras in the eighties, assisting in the killing of families that opposed them.  But were we defending our freedom, attacking on the front line of a communist threat?  Or were we just being cruel and unable to respect other’s sovereignty, taking away a poor people’s path to self-support?  What is your perspective?

            Really interesting and related to the previous, perspective-based idea is how the Omelian coming of age announcement is made.  In the tale when one comes of age they are told of the poor child that is the sustenance of their otherwise happy realm.  Most stay, some walk away.  If you don’t think there is an announcement to be made (here in the US) then of course you don’t make the announcement.  No one hears it.  The critics have the task of not only creating the perspective but of also delivering the announcement.  That makes me think of the biblical (?) quote about sowing ideas on a receptive, fertile field.  Speaking of things biblical, that is another source of my disenchantment with the church: the fertile field of compassion and caring for the poor had been cultivated.  That is, the soil was conditioned.  Then ideas of justice were sown.  But growing up certain compassion-stalks were deemed unacceptable, not worth letting grow.  

            Another metaphor, I know.  What does it take to believe that we need to convince ourselves of things?