Kunta Kinte, Omelas, and The Road to Wigan Pier

Have you read Ursula K. Le Guin's  "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"? 

If not, it's worth doing. It's also pretty easy to find out there in InternetLand if you would like to have a go at it. And if that's not good enough, you can find it in New Dimensions III edited by Robert Silverberg, The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real by Le Guin, or you can buy it as a standalone ebook from Harper Perennial. The last is kind of a rip, though, as the story itself is only a few pages long. But you pays your money and you takes your choice.

I thought of Le Guin's story while reading Alex Haley's Roots today. Kunta Kinte was looking at a group of White people at a party on the plantation, and this is what went through his head:

"He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really live that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led."  (298)

It is also reminiscent of something Orwell had to say about the miners in Wigan Pier...but I can't seem to find that quote, so you'll have to take my word for it. Or better yet, read The Road to Wigan Pier. You won't regret it. 

Anyway...it all comes down to the same thing: the ruthless get rich by treating the poor like chattel. 

P.S. I think this was the Orwell line I was looking for. If not, it's close enough to get the point across.

"In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit._ _Supp., and the nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants--all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel."