The Perils of Indifference

Risk of not being conscience.


The graphic violence that comes from a community that seems so ordinary is so incredibly strange. The community members select a piece of paper, the person who is selected gets stoned to death. It seems odd that just because "The Lottery" is selecting that certain person, the person is automatically set apart of the others for no particular reason. There is nothing physically wrong with the person, but for some reason the person is given a death sentence. This short story relates to the KKK's mentality, for no apparent reason they hated the African American people with severe passion. The KKK killed hundreds of innocent African American people for there dark skin color, their different religion? In "The Lottery" the towns people killed an innocent person because of a timeless tradition. This is a tradition that is from so long ago that people don't even remember why a person had to be killed, they just continue to do it because that's hows its always been.

The biggest connection between both "the lottery" and the perils of indifference by Elie Wiesel is that nobody did anything to stop both of these events. The individuals involved in the Holocaust almost destroyed and broke the spirits of the whole Jewish community. The people around that knew about the Holocaust didn't attempt to stop the whole ordeal, they just went on living life normally. Just as the community in "the lottery" did, they finished the killing a perfectly normal person in there community, just in time for there next meal. Know imagine how it would be the world stood up to Hitler and the Nazis, our whole society would be different. The second world war might have come sooner, but so many Jewish lives could have been saved. The community of the lottery would have also saved many people if they stopped stoning people to death, if someone just stopped the washed out tradition. If our society could stop the actions that are wrong, then out whole society could benefit.