Why Blindly Follow Tradition? When a family or community gets in the habit of doing something, whether it be daily, weekly, or annually, it can turn into a tradition that everyone takes part in. Traditions can be passed down for years and years until one person or a group of people decide to change it or completely get rid of it. As years go on there can sometimes be changes made to traditions because the original founders of the tradition are not there to make sure everything stays the same and some members of the family or community may even forget why they are even participating in the tradition to begin with because it has been around for so long. In Shirley Jackson’s, The Lottery, the townspeople in a small village of New England blindly
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It is easy to be okay with something that is obviously wrong when you are not the one that will suffer from it. For these villagers, the stoning of one community member a year is acceptable, until it is their turn to get stoned. After the Hutchinson family was picked to draw again and Tessie began to get upset, saying that it was unfair, her friends that she spoke to earlier in the story tried to get her to cooperate. “’Be a good sport, Tessie.’ Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, ‘All of us took the same chance’” (Jackson). Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Graves would be equally as upset and would not want to just “be a good sport” if their family was chosen to pick again like the Hutchinson family, but since they did not get picked it does not affect them as much as it did Tessie. In the article by Melissa McQueen, the same thing happened during the “lottery” that was executed in the classroom. “The lottery winner began to cry when she realized that she had chosen the strip of paper with the black dot on it and would receive a 0 in the grade book… the whole class could not help but focus all attention on her” (McQueen 657). While everyone else in the class was excited because they were going to receive a score of 100 in the gradebook, there was one unlucky girl that was singled
It is easy to be okay with something that is obviously wrong when you are not the one that will suffer from it. For these villagers, the stoning of one community member a year is acceptable, until it is their turn to get stoned. After the Hutchinson family was picked to draw again and Tessie began to get upset, saying that it was unfair, her friends that she spoke to earlier in the story tried to get her to cooperate. “’Be a good sport, Tessie.’ Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, ‘All of us took the same chance’” (Jackson). Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Graves would be equally as upset and would not want to just “be a good sport” if their family was chosen to pick again like the Hutchinson family, but since they did not get picked it does not affect them as much as it did Tessie. In the article by Melissa McQueen, the same thing happened during the “lottery” that was executed in the classroom. “The lottery winner began to cry when she realized that she had chosen the strip of paper with the black dot on it and would receive a 0 in the grade book… the whole class could not help but focus all attention on her” (McQueen 657). While everyone else in the class was excited because they were going to receive a score of 100 in the gradebook, there was one unlucky girl that was singled