Maggie A Girl Of The Streets And The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

The Slums
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people” - Martin Luther King Jr. In the two stories, Maggie A Girl of the Streets and “The Common Herd”; Crane and Riis focus on the harsh conditions people live in at the Slums of New York. In the other story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", Le Guin presents the readers with an ideal society, however recognizes that there is an “evil” that exist. All three writers agree that the Slums of New York is abandoned by society, but all have their own reasoning why society chooses to ignore those who live in the slums.
In Maggie A Girl of the Streets, Crane describes the Slums of New York through the perception and surroundings of a young girl named Maggie. The book immediately begins with a clash between two young children defending their honor of the Rum Alley. Even though seeing children violently harm each other would startle most “humans”, it does not faze anyone living in the slums. “From a window of an apartment house that up reared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock

“They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, and impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do” (507). In the story there is a child that everyone is aware of, it lives in fear and looked at with pity and disgust. Even though people know that this is cruel they chose to do nothing if there is a chance that it would affect them. This is similar to how people view those who live in the slums. People pity them, but there is no way that you will ever catch the citizens doing anything to help