A form of gambling in which tickets with numbers are sold, and prizes are awarded according to a random procedure. Lotteries are often used to raise money for public or private purposes and have wide appeal as a painless method of taxation. Modern examples include a lottery for units in a subsidized housing block or kindergarten placements.
In the story The Lottery, Shirley Jackson explores the danger of blindly following tradition, as shown by Old Man Warner. The old man is the conservative force in the village, and he explains that the people of the village use human sacrifice to improve the crops. The story also suggests that the villagers do not really know what they are doing, but they feel compelled to continue with this tradition because that is what their parents and grandparents did.
Many of us have bought a lottery ticket or two in our lifetime. If you have, you know that the odds of winning a large prize are very low. In fact, most lottery players don’t win at all. But, even though most lottery winners lose their money, there are a few lucky people who do make it big. They usually aren’t compulsive gamblers, and they don’t buy their tickets for the sole purpose of beating the odds. Instead, they buy a little fantasy and a few moments of thinking “What if?”. They’re not fools, and neither are you.