A casual friend was asking me what the movie Hunger Games was all about and i told her my thoughts because i saw the movie and gave her the general concept.. She said to me Wow.. that reminds me of a short story movie she saw in elementary school back in the early 70's called "The Lottery" she described this terrible scenario and told me she never forgot it and that it traumatized her back then as a child of 8yrs..  I thought it sounded a bit harsh for kids that young and looked for it on the internet..   what i found was fascinating and interesting not only from the study of human nature and our thinking process point of view, but how the New world order will use sociological information like this to dominate us if we let them ..  The lottery was more frightening to me than the Hunger Games with all of Hollywoods glam around it being the winner in there lottery ... your thoughts?    to watch the short film and read more on the Lottery and its author click the link below..

http://rudhro.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/video-the-lottery-1969-a-pow...

January 6, 1997 Written By JONATHAN LETHEM There’s "The Lottery," of course, the story everyone knows even if they don't remember Shirley Jackson's name. A small New England town, blandly familiar in every way, sleepwalking its way through ritual murder. Likely the most controversial piece of fiction ever published in the New Yorker, resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions, later adapted for television, radio and ballet, it now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype. It can be as difficult to persuade readers that the story is just one sheaf in the portfolio of one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers as it is to explain that the town portrayed in "The Lottery" is a real one. I know it is, because I lived there. North Bennington is a tiny village less than a mile from the otherwise isolated Bennington campus in Vermont. Shirley Jackson was married to Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic who taught at the college. And she spent her life in the town, raising four children, presiding over a chaotic household that was host to Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov, and at times going quietly crazy — and writing, always, with the rigor of one who has found her born task. Six novels, two bestselling volumes of deceptively sunny family memoirs and countless stories before her death at 48, in 1965.

Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson. She is best known for the short story “The Lottery” (1948), which suggests a secret, sinister underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when “The Lottery” was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that “no New Yorkerstory had ever received.” Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, “bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse.” ^[2] In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives. Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.” Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson’s works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of “personal, even neurotic, fantasies,” but that Jackson intended, as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb,” to mirror humanity’s Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as evidenced by Hyman’s statement that she “was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned ‘The Lottery,’ and she felt that they at least understood the story”.

-wikipedia

My friends comment to me was that even as a kid she was shocked and traumatized by this because everybody knew each other, it was a close nit community and the casual way they went about the stoning without questioning it as the evil it was just because it was what you were suppose to do it even if it was you own mom or dad the attitude was lets hurry up and get this over with so we can get home and start baking that cake or fix that tractor.. the doing what your told to do just because that's what we have always done..