by Maya H
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a short story based on our real world. Omelas is a dystopian world where its success thrives off a “suffering child”. This short story parallels our real world because we compromise our morals out of convenience and our selfish desires to consume the hard work of people in poorer countries producing our goods. The “suffering child” symbolizes all of the people who work in sweatshops across the globe. We get to relish in our goods that have been produced by a “suffering child” that works for little to no pay in unsafe working conditions.This includes consuming things ranging from the most trendy clothes at cheap prices to makeup advertised to us filled with lies on the label. All consumerism is creating excess waste by urging us to buy things we don’t need but rather want just for the sake of having it. Consumerism in the United States affects other countries by people being forced to work long harsh hours just to keep up with the high demand consumerism in the United States.
When we consume fast fashion we don’t realize how harmful its production and consumption is to our environment, people buy more apparel than they think they will use which leads to these cheap fabrics with microplastics ending up in landfills and oceans across the world. Half of these microplastic infested fabrics excrete into our oceans releasing thousands of microplastics into our ocean. Waste caused by consumerism leads to a plethora of issues for our earth. Industries that use sweatshops to produce their products are responsible for about 8-10% of our world’s carbon dioxide emissions running 24/7. About 85% of textiles from production industries go to dumps every year. It is almost impossible to live sustainably these days with consumerism plaguing our world. Our world thrives off the backs of hard workers constantly, just as Omelas thrives off the suffering of an innocent child who just wanted to live a normal life.
How do we escape this cycle? Some people have tried to combat this constant cycle, such as Billie Eilish! All of her merch clothing has been made from a variety of 100% recycled cotton, organic cotton, or recycled polyester. This is done by using residual dead stock from prior productions to reduce the amount of clothing waste done by other artists. It is refreshing to see artists follow Billie’s pursuits to try and give our future generations a chance to live on a healthy earth.
