remember that short story they made you read in school called The Lottery where the whole town gets together and just stones a motherfucker at random what the fuck was up with that
Actually, I know what was up with that!
When The Lottery (by Shirley Jackson) was first published, tons of people wrote into the newspaper that published it to demand to know what the hell it was meant to be about
I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
So basically the story is written in such a way that the uncritical nature of the townspeople is highlighted, when it comes to their own traditions. Every year the town commits outright violent murder, but because it’s ‘normal’ to them, they don’t think of it in those terms. The reader, who isn’t part of the town’s cultural assumptions, sees the horrific nature of their actions. But the characters in the story don’t.
In essence, it’s a story about normalization (before that phrase was coined). The point is to make you think about what cruelties might be passing uncriticized in your own culture, just because they seem ‘normal’ to you. Maybe your town doesn’t stone someone to death once a year, but there are other ways for communities to kill people, or let them suffer. And some of those are just as needless and just as rooted in unquestioned assumptions about how the world works, or how society needs to operate. The people in The Lottery were hesitant to give up their tradition because they believed it guaranteed them a good harvest. Revealing, in that hesitance, that the possibility of a bad outcome was more frightening to them than an atrocity they’d normalized.
I find that if I’m wearing Real Adult Business Clothes my worksona can do things like call people and check my inbox, whereas pajamas hellen mostly wants to shovel hamburgers into her face and set things on fire.
some people today complain that having the internet at our fingertips has spoiled millennials but like, i’m so glad i can look shit up whenever i want to. like can you imagine what it’d be like living in ancient greece and having to rely on herodotus when he says shit like “lions can only give birth once bc their cubs claw their way out of the womb”? i’d have to be like “o damn, guess that’s true” before going back to farming and dying of malaria bc i just thought my neighbor was cursing me again and didn’t go see a doctor
so, i only went in to get the shiny silvally code. should’ve taken like a minute or two at most but i was in there for upwards of ten. it was deeply unsettling right off the bat when i walked in because it was quiet. like really quiet. the tv that plays the gaming news and the speaker that plays the ads weren’t running. the cashier says hello and i get in line to wait. it is dead silent. nobody in the store is making any noise except for the cashier, who is typing. she’s helping a little boy sell 12 PS4 games. the boys mom is walking back and forth behind him sipping her gas station brand cup of coffee. literally just walking back and forth from one end of the store to the other. all the while the entire store is silent, the kid is silent, the mom is silent… all 5 of the other full grown adults in this store are silent. and i’m the only one in line behind this kid, these other adults throughout the store are like standing in one space just staring and being quiet. they weren’t browsing, they weren’t talking. nobody was making any noise. i wasn’t making any noise. i was standing there thinking about how eerily silent it was in this gamestop and wondering what the hell was going on - hyper aware of every move i made because i didn’t want to make a noise and break the silence. this carried on for literally 10 minutes before another cashier came in through the front door and loudly exclaimed “i can’t leave you alone for five minutes.” he called me to the counter and asked me what i needed help with. it was like immediately the ambient noises of gamestop all returned at once and i stepped forward to get my code.
my favorite part of this is the implication that not only was the first cashier somehow responsible for the eerie silence to begin with but also that this has certainly happened before
