The Cost of Ignorance

In the story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson the villagers who seem passive and unassertive turn monstrous when a mob mentality kicks in and they stone one of their own because of tradition. This can relate to everyone, sure maybe not to this extreme but when given an opportunity to throw something at someone most people take a shot at it. This can be proven by comparing it with school dodge ball, even though the objective of the game is to hit someone with a soft foam ball that can't do any fatal damage, people still try to throw the ball as hard as they can with the intention of causing harm to the recipient. Many people would like to believe that they wouldn't do such a thing but when everyone else is doing it, it's hard to not participate.

Eli presents a speech named "The Perils of Indifference" to president, first lady, and others attending the millennium lecture series in April 1999, he tells them of his past as a Polish teenager in the Holocaust. Eli explains how important compassion really is. In "The Lottery" the women draws the marked piece of paper which means she is to be stoned for no particular reason, Eli explains that sometimes not caring is even worse than anger. The villagers in "The Lottery" show that they don't care for the importance of a human life and see the stoning as an inconvenience, to take time out of their day to participate in this event. "The Perils of Indifference" explains the same thing happened in the Holocaust, only Nazi soldiers took lives of Jewish people because they were given orders to, and they did it without remorse. Eli was right to say that if one were to not have compassion that said someone could to unthinkable acts.