But you know, I just couldn't accept this statement.
I am sickened by all the terrible stories we are seeing every day the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants by the ICE Gestapo and their fellow travellers at Border Patrol - the lying and the violence, the needless pointless abuse and cruelty, the hidden detention centres all over the country, the concentration camps that will be warehousing tens of thousands by this summer, flying captive people around the country so nobody can monitor how they're being treated, the lack of accountability, the injustice, the hundreds of judicial orders that have been ignored.
And now we are seeing targeting of trans people - Kansas just took away their drivers licenses and birth certificates - it was never about bathrooms and sports, it was always just about finding more people to demonize and hate.
Next they'll target gay marriage, then equal rights for non-whites and women. Freedom and equality and rule of law are ending in the United States now.
So really, I'm not sure I can still give credit to how talented their athletes are, how beautiful their country is, or how many fine and wonderful people live in it still. Sherman's "hooray for how well the US team did in Milan" just reminded me way too much of this:
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
. ...Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thingTrump's United States is based on abominable misery.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. ....
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.
...there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. ... 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.
Rosie O'Donnell went to Ireland. George Clooney moved to France. Timothy Snyder is at the University of Toronto now. A thousand nurses moved to Canada in the last year. And hundreds of doctors. Academics and researchers have left the US too.
- At least 180,000 US citizens relocating overseas in 2025 - Departing Americans have flipped the migration balance, pushing U.S. departures above arrivals for the first time since 1935 - The share of U.S. adults who said they desired to relocate overseas permanently doubled between 2010 and 2025
— Dan Meyer (@meyersmusings.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 8:39 PM
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"The American dream" for some is apparently a two-bedroom coastline villa in Barcelona. The number of Americans moving to Ireland more than doubled from 2024 (4,900) to 2025 (9,600.) Via @gallup.com : approximately 40 percent of American women between ages 15 to 44 say they want to leave the U.S.
— Dan Meyer (@meyersmusings.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 8:51 PM
Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers. The last time before 2025 that more people left the U.S. than came in was 1935. This is in the @wsj.com - what’s the slogan: making America a pariah, making it a place to leave? www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...
— Kat O’Brien (@lavidagata.bsky.social) February 26, 2026 at 7:25 AM
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Higher US salaries (ie equity in real estate, savings and stocks) are NOT why people are leaving America. It's just HOW they're leaving America. People are leaving because there are horrors occurring and building into larger horrors. It's not a feel good, aren't we great story. It's a dead canary.
— Patrixmyth (@patri.xyz) February 26, 2026 at 3:31 PM
seems bad
— Isaac Rowlett (@isaacrowlett.bsky.social) February 26, 2026 at 7:35 AM
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The new American dream is leaving the US.
— alexjungle.bsky.social (@alexjungle.bsky.social) February 26, 2026 at 8:21 PM
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3 comments:
The last Bluesky post shows what we all know, that young women are among the most vulnerable to harm in America. Forcing a few trans people to correct their falsified driver's licenses causes no harm. Trans activists have always maintained that sex and gender are two different things. Driver's licenses list sex, not gender. As celebrity transman Buck Angel said, "Since when does your SEX marker prevent you from driving or getting a job?"
Young women are facing a pincer movement from both sides. The right denies them abortions and puts their lives at risk when dealing with ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages. The right would also stop married women from voting if they've changed their name from what's on their birth certificates.
OTOH, the organizations on the left that used to support young women have gone silent since embracing the murky and ill-defined "gender equity" instead of promoting women's sex-based rights. Heard anything from NOW, NARAL or LEAF lately? Planned Parenthood went from an abortion and women's health provider to the nation's second largest cross-sex hormone provider, thereby compromising female health. We've known since the East German doping scandals of the 1970s of the terrible, permanent harms, including cancer and infertility, that masculinizing testosterone causes females. The ACLU, once led by fierce women's rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsberg, now edits her quotes to erase women and fights to put women's lives and bodies at risk by keeping violent male sex offenders locked in women's prisons and making female athletes compete against males.
Democratic polling showed that they handed Trump the White House on these issues. They can't claim they weren't warned. Lifelong Democrat and former ACLU attorney Kara Dansky laid it all out before the last election in her book The Reckoning: How Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. If the Epstein files show nothing else, it's how much influential men on both the right and the left hate women and girls and collude to harm them. No wonder 40% of young women want to leave.
American women know now that having problems with a pregnancy is a death sentence in so many states now. And it's not ever changing back.
Now American men are being told they must fight Forever Wars for no reason.
And I expect Trump will cancel elections now too, because war.
I was not expecting to see "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" here. Cool. Ursula K. le Guin was an incredible writer and person and we were not worthy of her.
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