Reply #18: I have a different read on the story. Omelas is glittering, happy, beautiful, secure - who wouldn't

[Hannah Bell]

want to live there?

But some choose not to, & leave the city -- because the apparent happiness is based on the misery of the child in the basement. And they choose not to partake because of that.

Which is a metaphor for our own system, & the function of the poor, the low-paid workers, the super-exploited in the third world, the prisoner, etc.

The story ends:

"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Suggests something entirely different to me than your read. Who are "the ones who walk away"? and what's "the place less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness"?