Thoughts on The Lottery…

I know we didn’t go over this in class today, but this story is worth making a post about. I’m not writing my paper over this story, but I figure I should write something about it. As I was reading it, I felt kind of uneasy because I could almost predict where it was going based on the title alone, but I thought I might be wrong. I kind of wanted to be wrong. It’s pretty wild to think that an entire society could have such a warped sense of how things should be done. When we look at it in the story, it’s a sick and twisted sort of game they play, but when you think about it, this kind of behavior has actually happened throughout history. It’s not just a fictional occurrence. As one example of this, I think it was the Aztecs who actually used human sacrifice in some of their rituals. Then awhile later, came the Salem Witch Trials. Another example could be the concentration camps during WWII. During all of these times in history, the societies just watched as people were killed to further what their society viewed as their own self interest. The only example I can think of in modern day society is capital punishment. Is it really right to take someone’s life in the best interest of society? That is a debate in itself. However, I’m sure there are other modern examples I can’t think of at the moment. Point being, we may think it’s ludicrous for a society to randomly kill off it’s citizens, but the line between a fictional story and a real-life society may be thinner than we think.

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