I guess my first “hotspot” is simple enough, and that is, why would you kill someone in front of their family because of tradition. The whole story people were talking about how they had been doing this for years. So year after year they must be killing a person from the small village. A sacrifice for the gods maybe. But that was totally out of left field when they started to pelt Mrs. Hutchinson. I understood immediately afterwards why she was fighting for her kids and the unfairness in their picks. What a crazy lottery. I wonder what would happen in a member of the village decided to skip the lottery. Would they be automatically picked and stoned in the near future by the village mob?
My second “hotspot” from this reading, “The Lottery” is hard to find. I could barely come up with one “hotspot” for this story, so this second one might be a little weak. But, it’s going to have to be the way the lottery was conducted, alphabetically. For this lottery Mr. Adams has the best set up. He is least likely to pick the slip with the black spot on it. He has the best chances. Mr. Zanini ought to be pissed that he picks last. By that point if the slip wasn’t drawn his chances to pick it are better than anyone else’s. My name is Thies and if my city of Bay Village decided to hold this lottery I would fight for a random way to pick slips, probably by addresses or age. But actually, if my city were doing this I would just leave altogether. That’s not a tradition worth dying for.
From “How to Tell a True War Story” my first “hotspot” was that Lemon’s sister never wrote back to Rat for writing that nice letter about her brother. I thought that what Rat did was honorable and empathetic. So no response from Lemon’s sister to his supposed best friend is sad. For people in war receiving letters from home is like Christmas morning. It’s the best kind of excitement. So I didn’t like hearing that rat was never written back to. You would think that in response to his letter the sister would have had something to say but no, nothing.
Finding a second “hotspot” in this story was difficult. There wasn’t one thing that stood out to me after the first hotspot but a bunch of little things stood out. I guess it was the story about the six men that had to camp out on a recon mission up in the mountains for a week. Complete Silence. Not talking for a day here, at home, would be hard. Up in the mountains on that mission, not talking was probably the easiest thing to do. I wouldn’t want to talk, you got to stay hidden. But what would be hard would be sitting still for seven days. Impossible! Not moving around for a week is torture. Not to mention that these guys all have to go to the bathroom and are starving simultaneously. The author wrote that “war is hell” is generalized and harder to relate to when you actually get there. But that generalized saying hasn’t survived this long because it’s false. War is hell, whether you’re taking bullets or not moving a muscle for a week, war is hell.
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