Younger generation should believe in traditional practices.

Assalamualaikum everyone. Alright, so this is going to be my very first English entry. This particular entry is actually all about the last assignment for my English As Second Language study of my second semester that I submitted few days ago. It is called text production essay where we actually write the essay based on a short story that is chosen by our teacher,our awesome teacher indeed, Ms. Sharon!The short story was "The Lottery" written by Shirley Jackson. So, I was thinking of sharing this piece of work here in my blog, then I questioned myself, why not? Nonetheless I'm pretty sure here that you will find this essay very boring. There are few reasons, first of all yeah I didn't squeeze my mind writing this to impress you..haha..no offense..Well, after all my English command is obviously very limited. Room of improvements are everywhere, you'll come to them later. Another justification could be, it's a text production essay after all, meaning that it is an academic essay, we don't write flowery essay for academic writing, it's very straight forward instead. Moreover there is word count limitation,we cannot exceed 800 words. So we have to put everything by trying not to waste a single word. That's all you need to know before going through this I guess, in case if you really intend to.(^_^)

Younger generation should believe in traditional practices.

Tradition can be defined as belief or custom that is inherited from the older generation of certain group of human. There are millions of traditional practices from all over the world that differ specific community from another. The short story ‘The Lottery’ authored by Shirley Jackson, illustrates clearly how strong a group of people that are living together in a small village cling to their tradition even though the tradition seems to be ridiculous somehow. The tradition is the lottery where annually during summer without fail one of the villagers will have to be sacrificed in order to increase the corn harvests. From the story, several evidences can be extracted to hold up the fact that younger generation should believe in traditional practices. Youngsters should believe in traditional practices because tradition embraces the identity of the community. It is also important for them to have trust in tradition so that the continuity of the tradition can be secured and last but not least to strengthen the bonds amongst them.

  The first justification is tradition embraces the identity of the community. Tradition always comes along with some significant stories behind them that most of the times give the uniqueness to the community that hold to it. If the youngsters of the community do not bother to believe in the practices, sooner or later the tradition will be obsolete and eventually be forgotten. From the story, referring to the line “there was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a new village here”, the writer exhibits that the black box that is used for the lottery has a important story behind it. The present box is not the original box that was made by the first generation of the village but it was constructed by using some pieces of the original box. It gives the villagers something to differentiate them from other communities. Therefore, the younger generation has to believe in the traditional practices because traditions bring the identity to the society.

Besides, it is also crucial for the younger generation to believe in traditional practices so that the continuity of the traditions can be secured. Youngsters play essential roles in any community as in certain period of time they will be the leaders. If this group does not believe in the custom, then how would they keep the originality of the tradition? When the originality is affected, slowly the belief will be faded away from the community. From the story, Old Man Warner, the one who is considered as the luckiest one as he survived from the lottery for seventy seven times, explicitly showed his standpoint that the tradition should be kept original. He kept voicing out his dissatisfaction towards the reality that the other villages has given up the ritual. For instance, when Mr. Adams said, “Some places have already quit lotteries”, Old Man Warner said “Nothing but trouble in that” in reply. He even added on “Pack of young fools” portraying how he regretted the situation. Old Man Warner might appear to be annoying. Nonetheless in a way he was just trying to keep the originality of the belief so that the future generation can experience the same thing as their ancestors. It is undoubted that youngsters should know well their tradition so that it can be maintained.

Last but not least, traditions are critical for youngsters so that the bonds amongst them can be strengthened. Younger generation nowadays is living their lives very isolated from others. One of the major contributors to this problem is the technology that leads to sedentary lifestyle. On the other hand, traditions are mostly collective practices, thus it will indirectly require the younger generation to rub their shoulders. From the story, there are some parts that show the tradition actually keeps the villagers close to each other like “Soon the men began to gather, surveying their children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes”  and “They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands”. These two scenarios are indeed very normal to any tradition. These two situations actually show that the tradition somehow keep the villagers close together. Hence younger generation must believe in traditions to strengthen the bonds amongst them.

In conclusion, it is unmistakable that younger generation should believe in traditional practices. The relevance are firstly tradition gives the identity to the community, secondly to ensure the continuity of the tradition itself and ultimately to strengthen the bonds amongst the younger generation. Rationally, the government should have taken the pragmatic steps to conserve the traditions with provided the practices are not illogically harmful to the citizens.

  

(799 words)

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