se la comieron sonriendo tranquilos

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.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

"Ambiguity is the strength of Le Guin’s original, but it’s also this ambiguity that seems to frustrate so many modern readers. Contemporary takes on the story—including formal publications like the two we’ve discussed above, but also a thousand conversations dispersed across Twitter, LiveJournal, and the like—so often try to defeat it, either by imagining a solution or reading a specific, narrow meaning into the piece.

Some of this may be a result of the current trend in science fiction and fantasy to declare a story’s point of view right from the start: to grab the reader by the hand and say, “HEY, I’m about to deliver a parable… so listen up!” This is a tendency that now extends far beyond the text of the stories in question, having become part of the marketing as well; one need only browse Twitter or the website of a major publisher for a few minutes to find marketing copy to the effect of “Do you want to read a new story that grapples with the questions of class and climate change? Here it is!” Perhaps modern readers, expecting a clear signpost from Le Guin but finding none, have adopted a positively Omelian tendency to wander in search of meaning, certain that it is out there, somewhere, but not quite knowing the way.

He's waving hello to you

An adorable little hognose doing their best to become a ring 

Top it with still some nitrogen rich compostable matter, in this case grass clippings:

Some carbon-rich matter, in this case old wood chips:

And keep layering until it's pretty thick:

And then walk away and ignore it until spring. All winter long, it'll be decomposing, while killing the grass and weeds underneath. By spring time, the soil underneath will be nice & loose and fertile, and you'll be able to plant straight into it.

To answer the weed seeds question, I personally usually top it off with a thick layer of fall leaves or wood chips, which doesn't give seeds a good place to start. Both of these are used as weed-preventing mulches here. It also helps that were going into the cold season, so they're not going to get much of an opportunity to grow.

Here's some pictures from the spring & summer.

I plan on doing this after all the blackberry bushes are removed (they're an invasive species and will take over everything and destroy privacy fences) as well as the English ivy.

For around rose bushes, I personally wouldn't go that deep, and I might forego the cardboard*, depending on what weeds you're facing around the roses. I would knife out anything with a tap root and pull out as much as possible for things like bindweed while trying not to damage the roses' roots. Like, if it's lawn right up to the base of the rose, cardboard yes, but if the roses are in a bed with scattered dandelions and annual weeds, a nice 3-4 inches of mulch after getting the taproots out should do. Wood chips are my favorite mulch.

Also, if you live somewhere with abundant fall leaves, then a nice 6 inch layer of leaves does a remarkably good job of discouraging things from coming up- excepting the aforementioned bindweed, english ivy, Himalayan blackberry, etc. Time of year also has an impact, because that gives you a strong clue to how much energy the plants have stored.