Death Unit- The Lottery

When thinking about the word "lottery", what usually comes to mind is going to your local gas station and buying a Hoosier Lottery number and hope that you get the right numbers in order to win. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson gives another meaning to the word "lottery". Peculiarly in this short story, winning meant death. When reading this story, I sensed that the lottery mentioned here and the lottery we think of modernly were way different. For example they mentioned that in some villages "the whole lottery took less than two hours..." [Jackson, 263-4]. A normal lottery would not take this long to decide the winner. It is also very weird that most of the village agrees to how the lottery runs. Why would families who have grown up together want to kill people of their own village. Although it is a human sacrifice for their harvest time, killing a person of your own family or village would be so hard. This is true yet they all go about doing these things nonchalantly. There is no hesitation and there seems to be no sadness from the spouses or children. What a sad story!