I was very surprised by this story The lottery, it starts off innocently enough with the children gathering rocks and coming to a lottery after school is done. The entire story is about the lottery system and how it wasn’t fair for Tessie. It is revealed that Tessie has drawn the bad card, there is a twist in that it ends up being Tessie is to be stoned by her family and friends as they surround her.
The ones who walk away from the Omelas is an interesting story as well because it describes the city as a perfect society and utopia, however, this concept and idea is constantly questioned in terms of legitimacy. The people are happy and it talks about their celebrations and traditions.
Both of these stories show how people in societies react to tradition and when constructs are built-in society how people are quick to conform and just do. People act blindly when they feel like everything will work out and attribute their behaviors to success without thinking deeply.
Even when a tradition proves to be outdated and evidently harmful, how do we speak up against it? This comes back to the ideas of dissent in order to speak against the tradition, and groupthink because clearly no one is willing to push back against the Lottery.
I agree that it’s really cool how quickly will conform to social norms when they have been brought up in that environment. It makes me think about what we do in our society that is considered weird to other people. Like we saw ourselves without knowing it was us would we judge?
The idea of differing cultures is so interesting to me. One thing that we may believe to be taboo may be the same thing that another culture builds their entire society around. I like how to tied this idea together and connected the story lines.