Gabriela D’Andrea
4/12/07
The Lottery
1. Many people feel that humans are inherently violent. How does this story illustrate
the violent nature of people? Can we ever expect people to become nonviolent? Write an essay about these issues.
This story demonstrates the violent nature of people. For seventy-seven years the
villagers of this town were having this lottery.
“Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,” Old man Warner said as he went through the
crowd. “Seventy-seventh time.”
This lottery was like any other civic activity. Every year on June 26at ten o’clock in the morning,the people in this small townand many otherswere excited to prepare for a lotto that took only two hours. An old, black and wooden box had the names of the three hundred people in this village. Each name of the head of the families, heads of households in each family and members of each familywas written onslips of paper. Theprize for the winner was not a nice and desired prize. It was thelife of a person. Adults prepared a pile of stones and children had their pockets full ofthe
smoothest and roundest pebbles. All the villagers took the same chance and the winner of the lottery must die. Everybody wanted to start and end with this as soon is possible.
“Well, now,” Mr. Summers said soberly, “guess we better get started, get this over with, so’s we can go back to work. Anybodyain’t here?”
The stool was put in the center of the square and the black box on it. The crowd kept their distance, leaving a distance between themselves and the stool. The official of the lottery called the people one by one so everybodycould have their chance to draw.
“Now, I’ll read the names-heads of families first- and the men come up and take a paper out of the box.” Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”
Some of the people hesitated, nervous and smiling, but each person reached into the black box and took out a slip of folded paper. They held it firmly as they returned to the crowd, where they did not look down at their hands. Finally, everyone opened the slips of paper, and only one had the black spot on it, the black spot made the night before by Mr. Summer. The unlucky winner was Mrs. Tessie Hutchinson.
For unknown reasons even Mrs. Delacroix, Mrs. Hutchinson’s friend was prepared with a selection of large stones that she had to pick up with both hands. Everyone participated in this awful and terrible lottery, including little Davy Hutchinson, Tessie’s youngest son had some pebbles to throw at his mother. Everybody was upon Tessie Hutchinson.
Even though, they talked about givingup the lottery,they continued with the same tradition every year.
“Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, ‘that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”
“Old Man Warner snorted. Pack of crazy fools,” he said. ‘Listening to theyoung folks, nothing’s good enough for them.”
In conclusion, the world would be better if it had less violence. Unfortunately, every day we hear in the news about:
A husband who killed the wife.
A mother who abused her children.
A man who was seriously attacked for being black, Hispanic, or gay.
Countries in war for silly reasons.
People doing terrorist attacks killing innocent people.
Cities like Juarez (Mexico) hundreds of women are dying in the last few years after being abused physical and mentally.
Other countries people prefer to take justice in their hand instead of waiting for the authorities to do it.
Students in college or school kill their classmates for any little reason.
Employees blame and kill their coworker for their personal problems.
Many people like in this story kill only because of superstition, ambition, revenge or just because they have mental disorder.
Everything depends on the society where we live. Where there is no sense of unity and family people tend to be more aggressive. They do not control their emotions and impulses. Why do we see more crimes and more violence? We can hope that we can stop or reduce the violence especially with the young people, but it is very difficult to achieve.
First, we need to change the society, educated people to have a sense of respect to each other, and other people’s life.
Second, people need to learn to control their temper and anger.
Third, every individual has to avoid watching violent movies, talk shows and videos games.
Fourth, parents and householders have to supervise their children and make sure that they are not involved in gangs, guns and drugs.
The authorities also need to help to put programs for young people who have problems with anger management. Most of the serious killers show their wrong behavior at an early age, but many times the parents do not want to admit that their child had anger management problems. Instead of looking for professional help, they ignore the problem and other innocents pay the consequences. I hope, one day we can all live in peace.