(31). Bobby, due to his naïveté, is innocently laughing about the stones that will soon be used as murder weapons. Jackson turns to the townspeople, who are wholly committed to the lottery. She makes this painfully clear when Tessie protests “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!” (45). Tessie protests not the lottery itself, but only the interference during the drawing. She repeats, in the final line of the text, "It isn't fair, it isn't right" (79). Even after being chosen for stoning, Tessie remains loyal to the practice of the lottery, blind to its cruelty even to her death. Jackson further illustrates the blindness of the townspeople, showing they have forgotten the tradition's meaning. Describing the black box from which slips are drawn, Jackson writes "the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it" (31). While the physical characteristics of the lottery like the box and slips have been modernized over time, only the moral implication of the murder is unchanged throughout the history of the tradition. The story even states that "because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations" (31). Specifically, Mr. Summers realizes that much of the town's tradition has been weakened since its inception, and he actively modernizes it. However, this society does not notice this due to its status of "tradition," regardless of its true meaning. Throughout "The Lottery," Jackson aims to establish, through the use of irony, symbols, and language choice, a theme that emphasizes the danger of following meaningless tradition. The story speaks about those who blindly follow traditions without regard for the consequences. Reception Readers The New Yorker received a "torrent of letters" inquiring about the story, "the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction". Many readers demanded an explanation of the situation in the story, and a month after the initial publication, Jackson responded in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 22, 1948): Jackson lived in North Bennington, Vermont, and her comment reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote "The Lottery". In a 1960 lecture (printed in her 1968 collection Come Along with Me) she recalled the hate mail