Imagine picking a ticket at your village’s lottery. You win! However, you will be sacrificed for the belief that they need a sacrifice for good harvests. How would you feel?
“The Lottery” is about a village, who has a belief that if they sacrifice someone annually, they will get good crops that year. The way they choose the victim is by each taking a raffle ticket out of a black box. Whoever has a pencil mark on their paper is the chosen sacrifice. The victim is to be stoned to death. The year the story takes place, Mr. Hutchinson is chosen to be the sacrifice. His wife, Mrs. Hutchinson, protests that Mr. Hutchinson didn’t have enough time to pick some other random ticket because the person holding the raffle box had already moved on. The general consensus unhappily agrees, and they put their tickets back into the box to pick again. This time, the sacrifice ticket is chosen by Mrs. Hutchinson. She claims its unfair, and wants to do the raffle again. However, this time the crowd refuses, and instead stones Mrs. Hutchinson to death.
My point of view is that the village shouldn’t even follow this tradition! It’s not scientific, it doesn’t work, and you are just killing an innocent person for nothing. Science and common sense says that killing someone is not going to help them get a good harvest. A sacrifice cannot help plants grow and produce goods, but fertilizer can! Also, people who do kill fellow humans on purpose should be sentenced to death, not random people who picked a ticket with a pencil mark on it.
To recapitulate, people shouldn’t follow the practice of sacrifice. It’s savage and barbaric. Maybe Mrs. Hutchinson was a little annoying, but she hasn’t done anything wrong. Following a tradition doesn’t mean you can’t change.