The Lottery
The LotteryThe Lottery
Overcrowding is a big problem in today’s society. Prisons, schools, UMASS Dartmouth, countries, cities, and many other places face the ordeal of overcrowding. There are many things people try to do to stop overcrowding certain areas. In Japan couples are only allowed to have two children, they must get permission from the government to have anymore. If a couple does have a third child without permission from the government, the child is taken away from them. Another solution for overcrowding is one found in the story “The Lottery”.
The solution for overcrowding in “The Lottery” is a very unintelligent one. The idea behind the lottery is that the head of every family picks a piece of paper from the black box. If the piece of paper, the head of the family picks out, has a black dot on it, him or one of his family members is going to get stoned to death. The family of the man who picked the black dot, start the second round of the lottery. Each family member picks a paper and the one with the black dot gets stoned to death. This happens once a year.
In “The Lottery” a man by the name of Bill Hutchinson is the man who draws the black dot. His family draws from the hat and his wife Tessie gets the black dot, this means she will be stoned to death. Before the lottery even started Tessie had forgotten the date and she did not even realize that the lottery was on this day. She showed up late and was not nervous about the event in which was about to happen. Her children were playing with other kids, her son gathering rocks and her daughter chatting away with friends.
The fact that her son was gathering rocks is ironic because now he must throw them at his own mother. This would seem creepy except the Tessie’s husband did not even seem phased that his wife was about to die. In fact Bill and his son probably joined in the stoning of Tessie. Also the Bill was probably so happy that it was not him about to die that he did not even realize he was about to lose a wife and mother to his children.
The actual plot to this short story is stupid if one thinks about it. For crowd control in this town of only three hundred people, one person is killed a year. One person getting killed every year is not exactly crowd control. It seems as though this is a tradition that is simply followed for traditions sake and not for the purpose of crowd control. The town this tradition takes place in should consider a new method of crowd control. Perhaps the head of the family who picks the black dot should be forced to move from the town instead of having themselves or their family member killed.