I’m not so sure. Considering the huge cost involved, I think there would be significant kicking back against it. This is especially so since the society depicted in the story seems so “American.” At very least, there would be an “anti” segment of the population.
Imagine if an American church instituted tithing…and the money was (to all visible purposes) thrown away. Not used for good works or charity, not used to build a new belfry, but thrown away. Used to buy, say, golden icons where were then thrown into a volcano. You’d very soon see people asking, “Why am I donating so much of my money just to feed the volcano?”
All the moreso in a case of loss of life. You think the abortion issue is contentious? This would be even moreso!
It is inconsistent with the “American” description. We like to argue about stuff. (This thread presented as evidence!)
Maybe in this fictional town, anyone who dares to dissent is exiled.
And maybe this is one of the few places with water or maybe other towns are ravaged by disease and famine (which only affirms to the townpeople that the rite works), so being exiled is akin to being tortured and killed. Maybe a person who questions is not only exiled, but so is their entire family.
I think people, even Americans, are fundamentally stupid. Most of us don’t even think to ask “why”. And for the ones of us who do, it’s just a navel-gazing exercise and doesn’t result in action.
Really? Or maybe they would just think, “Well, none of you fuckers helped gramma, so fuck your brother. Stone the SOB.”
Actually, the opposite is true. You have to show actual harm to society to change an institution, the inertia to leave it in place must be overcome.
Given the long human history of both human sacrifice and the scapegoat, how in the world do you conclude this is against human society?
Don’t have to imagine anything. See any number of televangelists who quite visibly spent money on useless self-benefitting bullshit and still managed to pull in the dough.
I always assumed that it was an allegory about how some kids at school are picked by their perceived weakness and destroyed so that everyone else can feel popular by comparison.
Son of a bitch! I thought that all went out with the Latin Mass and a whole bunch of other antiquated shit! Wow! Thank you for setting me straight, even though it lowers my opinion of the church very significantly. (Can you still buy redemption from sins?)
When I first saw the trailer for the Hunger Games film, I mistakenly thought it was based on this short story. I had read the short story years ago, but hadn’t heard of the Hunger Games books back then.
It would probably be tough to stretch out a short story like this into a feature-length film (much less a trilogy) though given how much hollywood loves sequels/trilogies/quadrilogies/bajillionilogies I wouldn’t doubt they’d try!
The story was and is so shocking because it’s set in an otherwise completely ordinary and unremarkable American small town. I don’t think its setting is post-apocalyptic; the implication is that the lottery has endured in the present day (it was published in The New Yorker in 1948) even as the town has taken advantage of modern advances like vaccines, cars, electricity, etc.
It’s fiction, and very well-written fiction. It blew me away when I first read it in high school. In the real world, though, I agree with Trinopus that it probably couldn’t have lasted into the modern era. The Lottery is community-sanctioned ritual murder. All it would take to end it would be one exile from the town, or one grieving family member, calling in the state police.
But this ritual takes place in (or has recently taken place in) other communities as well. The state police must know about this. Even in the 1940’s, when this was published, there were cases of lynching which went unpunished, because that was “how things were done”. I think this falls under the same category.
Remember that Shirley Jackson was an outsider in the community where she spent much of her life.
She was born in San Francisco, and grew up in a bookish family. She married a future literature critic, and was used to being around writers, artists and intellectuals. And then…
Look, TODAY Vermont is regarded as a liberal Utopia and Bennington is one of the most liberal towns in America. But when Jackson’s husband took a faculty post at Bennington College, she was plopped into the middle of what was THEN an old-fashioned New England community she regarded as insular, backward, stifling, uncurious, conformist and overly bound to tradition.
Self-styled progressive Shirley saw all kinds of things in Vermont that made no sense to her, but which nobody would ever change because, by golly, “That’s how we’ve ALWAYS done things.”
An annual lottery where the “prize” is death isn’t supposed to be realistic- it’s just an extreme, exaggerated version of how Jackson perceived small town New England in the Forties and Fifties.
To clarify about the Catholic Church’s rules, it used to be the rule that you couldn’t have meat on any Friday year-round, or on any day of the week during Lent. In the Second Vatican Council, this was changed to no meat on Fridays in Lent, but meat was fine on other Fridays and other Lent days. In both cases, before and after the change, “meat” is defined to exclude fish.
In any event, the point remains, in that many restaurants still have specials on fish on Fridays, year-round, and others have specials on fish during Lent, throughout the week. There may still be a practical reason for that, though: It might be impractical to have the specials just on Fridays in Lent when it “means something”.
I’m not Catholic, but the way I read the following sentence from Justin_Bailey’s link is that meat on Fridays is not acceptable at all unless you do some other form of penance.
“Every person 14 years of age or older must abstain from meat (and items made with meat) on all other Fridays of the year, unless he or she substitutes some other form of penance for abstinence.”
Well, when I was a kid back in New York, whenever St. Paddy’s Day happened to fall on a Friday, Bishop Mugavero invariably issued a decree that, this one time, it was okay to have corned beef and cabbage.
Human sacrifice would only be allowed when the wealthy and privileged in a community are not included in the pool of potential sacrifices.
Think that I’m wrong?
*Sharia *law calls for thieves hands to be cut off, yet there are no wealthy people in Iran or Saudi Arabia minus an appendage. China executed a number of drug addicts in the wake of Mao’s takeover in 1949, although none of the upper echelon of the Chinese Communist party.
Jackson’s “Lottery” would only work until it became clear that the “important” people in the community were excluded or could become victims. It would then either be discontinued; or it would become a ceremonial, rather than a practical, ritual.
Institutional racism held sway in entire states in the Deep South, true. But it’s clear that the Lottery is much more localized, and is already being dropped in other nearby communities. Not quite analogous.
Er… Nothing, I guess, it just seems strange to define “fish” as “not meat.” Never mind. I had honestly thought it had been repealed along with the Latin Mass.