Anyone who sat through high school English classes should be familiar with a short story written by Shirley Jackson, titled, “The Lottery.” For those who missed it, I give you a quick recap. It’s set in a small farming community where an ancient tradition is honored every June. Mrs. Jackson dragged out the plot to create suspense, but I’ll spoil everything up front. This town practices human sacrifice in order to ensure a good harvest. A bad harvest means everyone dies of starvation, so one death to save the rest seems a reasonable deal. The sacrifice is chosen by lottery, thus the title. The head of each household draws a slip of paper from the box and one slip is marked with a black spot. Another drawing is held to pick one person from that family and this person is stoned to death.
The central character is a woman named Tessie. She is looking forward to the lottery and is quite happy, right up to the point when her husband draws the black spot from the box. She is less happy when she draws the second black spot. She tries to protest the unfairness of it all, but no one hears her because they are busy throwing rocks at her.
Mrs. Jackson does a wonderful job of concealing the surprise ending, until the very last paragraphs. It’s all a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, until the purpose becomes clear. Millions of high school students have experienced that wide eyed moment of “what did I just read?” The story stays so true to human nature and the kind of people we interact with every day, it’s a shock to discover they have gathered for the purpose of killing one of their own.
The story was published in 1948, just as the Cold War was getting cranked up and the Red Menace was a real thing. It created a real stir, but no one was really certain of why. It could be interpreted in many ways. A sacrificial offering has traditionally had two probable purposes. The first is a thank you gift. The God or Gods that might be, have been really nice and this sacrifice is a token of our appreciation. The other purpose is a bribe for future performance. Please take this gift and don’t hurt the rest of us.
For most places on this planet, starvation is no longer the threat it once was, so it’s difficult to imagine the pall it once spread over everything. A crop failure could mean the death of half or more of the people in a community. The very young and the very old would be first to suffer. This was a real threat and anything which promised a good crop was easy to accept, even the death of some loved one.
The lottery aspect of the story highlights the essence of herd mentality. The value of being in a herd is that when the leopard shows up, he can chase only one, and if he catches one, the rest get away, while the leopard has lunch.
The most unsettling thing about The Lottery is it demonstrates the way we deal with a lot of problems. This week has been a good example, except or method of choosing victims is more haphazard than in Mrs. Jackson’s story. We have a lot guns in America. It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. We even wrote it into the Constitution. The core of this issue is the perception of safety. The stress of feeling unsafe and threatening is debilitating. It makes life very difficult. Anything that gives us the perception of safety will be valued, even overvalued. The need to feel safe is so great, we’ll buy counterfeit safety with real money.
On the face of it, the idea a gun can make one safe is pretty silly. A hard hat will protect you from falling objects. Imagine if you didn’t actually wear the hat, but instead held it in your hand and tried to swat falling objects away from your head. It would be difficult to get anything else done, but you could walk through a construction zone, secure in the feeling that your head was protected, because your hard hat was in your hand. A gun doesn’t work like a hard hat. There’s really no safety in one, but that was never the intention. An unloaded gun in a locked box is safe, but also useless. Who needs a useless gun? A gun is an offensive weapon and it’s only useful function is to inflict a lethal wound. There is some argument made that gun deters danger and thus keeps one safe, but that flies in the face of reason. If a man with a gun confronts a hostile person with a gun, the smart move is to shoot first. The idea of a fair gun fight is something out of a cowboy movie. Two men stand face to face, each waiting for the other to touch his pistol. The dead guy always drew first, but the good guy was just a little faster. This is completely insane. If a person is threatening to kills you why wait until his pistol is in your face. In reality, the dead guy was shot in the back.
We no longer fear starvation as we did once, but we still live in fear. Perhaps there is a human need for vague and poorly defined threats. A clear and present threat is actually a simple matter. If something is on fire, the remedy is obvious. It’s different if there’s just a hint of smoke in the air. The new fear which replaced starvation doesn’t really have a name, or rather has a varying name. Some call it a “bad man.” This is usually modified to be “a bad man with a gun.” In order to feel safe from this threat, we must have a gun close at hand.
This means guns are close at hand for a lot of people. The great mass of people includes good guys, bad guys, criminals, the mentally ill, and toddlers. All of these people have a gun close at hand and there is nothing we can do about it. Anything which restricts guns for the bad guys, criminals, the mentally ill, and toddlers, will also restrict guns for good guys. It’s a bargain we make, over and over again. Easy gun access for law abiding citizens means easy gun access for everyone. There is no way around this simple fact. It means we accept all the murders, the suicides and the accidents, as the cost of easy access to guns.
This brings us back to The Lottery. The people who gathered in that field to choose a person to die, were able to do so because everyone of them assumed the rocks were meant for someone else. One death in June was a small price to pay for corn in November. We are now a more enlightened people. We understand meteorology and know that whatever Gods there maybe, stoning a housewife will not bring rain, so we don’t do that anymore.
What we do to feel safe, is keep a gun close at hand. We create a mythology to support this and fashion a system of thought in which it makes sense. The most common rationale repeated in many different ways is, “ There is evil in the world and if evil has a gun, I want one too.” It’s easy to imagine a man in a crowded store, yelling at shoppers to get out of his way, because he had to shoot something evil.
In order for this desire to be realized, we must offer sacrifice. We don’t get to set up a selections system as demonstrated in The Lottery story. We let the people who should not have easy access to guns choose for us, but whoever they choose, we accept as the price we pay for our easy access to guns. It’s not really a matter of, “If a bad guy has I gun, I must also have a gun.” It is, “If I can have a gun, anyone can have a gun.”
The central character is a woman named Tessie. She is looking forward to the lottery and is quite happy, right up to the point when her husband draws the black spot from the box. She is less happy when she draws the second black spot. She tries to protest the unfairness of it all, but no one hears her because they are busy throwing rocks at her.
Mrs. Jackson does a wonderful job of concealing the surprise ending, until the very last paragraphs. It’s all a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, until the purpose becomes clear. Millions of high school students have experienced that wide eyed moment of “what did I just read?” The story stays so true to human nature and the kind of people we interact with every day, it’s a shock to discover they have gathered for the purpose of killing one of their own.
The story was published in 1948, just as the Cold War was getting cranked up and the Red Menace was a real thing. It created a real stir, but no one was really certain of why. It could be interpreted in many ways. A sacrificial offering has traditionally had two probable purposes. The first is a thank you gift. The God or Gods that might be, have been really nice and this sacrifice is a token of our appreciation. The other purpose is a bribe for future performance. Please take this gift and don’t hurt the rest of us.
For most places on this planet, starvation is no longer the threat it once was, so it’s difficult to imagine the pall it once spread over everything. A crop failure could mean the death of half or more of the people in a community. The very young and the very old would be first to suffer. This was a real threat and anything which promised a good crop was easy to accept, even the death of some loved one.
The lottery aspect of the story highlights the essence of herd mentality. The value of being in a herd is that when the leopard shows up, he can chase only one, and if he catches one, the rest get away, while the leopard has lunch.
The most unsettling thing about The Lottery is it demonstrates the way we deal with a lot of problems. This week has been a good example, except or method of choosing victims is more haphazard than in Mrs. Jackson’s story. We have a lot guns in America. It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. We even wrote it into the Constitution. The core of this issue is the perception of safety. The stress of feeling unsafe and threatening is debilitating. It makes life very difficult. Anything that gives us the perception of safety will be valued, even overvalued. The need to feel safe is so great, we’ll buy counterfeit safety with real money.
On the face of it, the idea a gun can make one safe is pretty silly. A hard hat will protect you from falling objects. Imagine if you didn’t actually wear the hat, but instead held it in your hand and tried to swat falling objects away from your head. It would be difficult to get anything else done, but you could walk through a construction zone, secure in the feeling that your head was protected, because your hard hat was in your hand. A gun doesn’t work like a hard hat. There’s really no safety in one, but that was never the intention. An unloaded gun in a locked box is safe, but also useless. Who needs a useless gun? A gun is an offensive weapon and it’s only useful function is to inflict a lethal wound. There is some argument made that gun deters danger and thus keeps one safe, but that flies in the face of reason. If a man with a gun confronts a hostile person with a gun, the smart move is to shoot first. The idea of a fair gun fight is something out of a cowboy movie. Two men stand face to face, each waiting for the other to touch his pistol. The dead guy always drew first, but the good guy was just a little faster. This is completely insane. If a person is threatening to kills you why wait until his pistol is in your face. In reality, the dead guy was shot in the back.
We no longer fear starvation as we did once, but we still live in fear. Perhaps there is a human need for vague and poorly defined threats. A clear and present threat is actually a simple matter. If something is on fire, the remedy is obvious. It’s different if there’s just a hint of smoke in the air. The new fear which replaced starvation doesn’t really have a name, or rather has a varying name. Some call it a “bad man.” This is usually modified to be “a bad man with a gun.” In order to feel safe from this threat, we must have a gun close at hand.
This means guns are close at hand for a lot of people. The great mass of people includes good guys, bad guys, criminals, the mentally ill, and toddlers. All of these people have a gun close at hand and there is nothing we can do about it. Anything which restricts guns for the bad guys, criminals, the mentally ill, and toddlers, will also restrict guns for good guys. It’s a bargain we make, over and over again. Easy gun access for law abiding citizens means easy gun access for everyone. There is no way around this simple fact. It means we accept all the murders, the suicides and the accidents, as the cost of easy access to guns.
This brings us back to The Lottery. The people who gathered in that field to choose a person to die, were able to do so because everyone of them assumed the rocks were meant for someone else. One death in June was a small price to pay for corn in November. We are now a more enlightened people. We understand meteorology and know that whatever Gods there maybe, stoning a housewife will not bring rain, so we don’t do that anymore.
What we do to feel safe, is keep a gun close at hand. We create a mythology to support this and fashion a system of thought in which it makes sense. The most common rationale repeated in many different ways is, “ There is evil in the world and if evil has a gun, I want one too.” It’s easy to imagine a man in a crowded store, yelling at shoppers to get out of his way, because he had to shoot something evil.
In order for this desire to be realized, we must offer sacrifice. We don’t get to set up a selections system as demonstrated in The Lottery story. We let the people who should not have easy access to guns choose for us, but whoever they choose, we accept as the price we pay for our easy access to guns. It’s not really a matter of, “If a bad guy has I gun, I must also have a gun.” It is, “If I can have a gun, anyone can have a gun.”