#the usamerican struggle with critical reading is a long one sadly

[mayra-quijotescx]

Saw that post going around on another of the three wild animal enclosures I regularly pace around in that was like "hey you know how everyone has that one short story assigned in your english class in like the tenth grade that still has you fucked up decades later"* and I immediately knee-jerk went "GOD, yes, 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, what the fuck, man"

and then I stopped

and then I went "y'know what, it's been like 16 years, and thanks to how those 16 years have gone, my brain has been squeezed and twisted like playdough in the hands of an angry child more than once in the intervening time. let me make sure I am not being unfair to something I read once in my relatively halcyon youth and may not properly remember."

so I pull up the wikipedia page and yeah, no, I remembered the core details, the kids gathering stones in play, every household drawing a piece of paper, the sweetest old lady in the village eagerly grabbing a rock that she has to lift two-handed from how heavy it is, Tessie Hutchinson going screaming to her death not opposed to the system, but opposed to her household being directly affected by it, so it goes...

...but what I did not recall, or may indeed have not learned, was that when The New Yorker published this in 1948, readers got so fucking outraged by it that they pulled subscriptions and collectively hurled reams of letters in a volume previously unheard of to the magazine, which then forwarded them to Jackson. The letters ranged in tone from dismissive to threatening, with many people demanding Jackson explain herself and her story, to the tune of 10-12 letters per day for the rest of the summer. Her own mother scolded her in one such letter for not writing something cheerful instead. Several people wrote in thinking it was a true story and requesting details on where they could go to watch one.

Kinda feels ironic, IDK.

*****

*OP, if this somehow makes it to you, please accept my humblest apologies for mangling your post, like so many innocent fingers in the machinery that led to the company paying off the family in "The Monkey's Paw", which my school read in the eighth grade for some reason, what the fuck, what the fuck