How “The Lottery” Shows Us the Importance of Speaking Up

  

    People have habits to do things that were done before, which is not good. That’s what happens in the story named The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson. In the short story, the lottery people have a weird tradition that they do each year, where they get a black box and they put all the names of the people who are participating in it and if your name is drawn other people will pelt you with rocks until you die. The story teaches us what happens when we go with the flow and don’t speak up because it leads to devastating consequences.

    It is not always good to follow other people's decisions. Stick with your own guts. People in this village have a tradition to kill one another with rocks but they do not know why. They also don’t know who made this tradition so they just keep on doing it. People are just following one person who is the organizer of the village and they just listen to what he says. They don’t go with their guts. This shows that people who don’t listen to their own minds will probably get into something bad. If the villagers did listen to their guts then they would have banned this cult-like tradition a long time ago. In the story, Mr. Summers is trying to get people to go faster and commands them.

    Well, everyone,” Mr. Summers said, “that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get it done in time.

    This quote shows that Mr. Summers is telling other people to hurry up. Other people know that Mr.Summers is the organizer of the whole village so they listen to him and they hurry up. This tells us that when humans know that there are higher-ranked people, then they will listen to them.

    Not only is bossing people around what they do but they manipulate people with an object.

    Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here… The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

    This quote shows that if the black box was not there then the villagers would not be still doing the tradition. Because people need someone above them to make a tradition, so if they don’t have anything then there is no point in following the tradition.

    In conclusion, the reason why people get manipulated is because people have something to look up to. This is bad because if people find out about this, then the world is going to make really bad cults and then the world is going to go into chaos.