Would $1.5 billion have helped?
Matt Pearl
Deadline day for my office staff is Wednesday at our newspaper — there’s this do-or-die cutoff that forces us to finish the paper in time to be printed on Wednesday afternoons for circulation on Thursday. Sometimes it pains me that it is so.
For example, the big Powerball drawing was set for Wednesday evening, and I have to get my 500 words written well before that. Oh, well. I don’t play, so I can’t win, and I’m fine with that.
But we have all likely over the past couple of weeks spent that mega-jackpot in our imaginations. Come on — be honest.
It would be quite a task to manage a fortune of that magnitude, as well as the unwanted pseudo friends and relatives who would expect a share of your good fortune.
It would be nice to write a big check to your church, or to a disease research cause that’s close to your heart. I’d enjoy building schools and hospitals, perhaps a stadium somewhere.
You would have to get rid of it all, right?
Who could expect to have a normal life with a billion — that’s a thousand million — in cash sitting in the bank? I’ve always thought the ideal sized lottery to win would be $10 million or so. It’s enough to get you out of debt, buy a fancy car, build a nice house, send the kids to college and not worry much about money again. But the average person could find ways to spend it all. That decreases the chance of society’s leeches gathering at your doorstep.
Every time I see America invest in something as worthy as the lottery, I feel a little pride. Don’t you?
And here I heard my whole life that it doesn’t do any good to tax poor people.
The lottery commissions seem to have found a way to do it effectively.
It is something that should shame us a bit: the fact that so many members of our population can manage to set aside a few dollars to participate in a virtually hopeless, but incredibly climactic gamble — yet cannot find the means to pay for life’s necessities in several cases.
I would call that a critique on humanity, not merely our American society. I doubt the purest intent behind assistance programs was to free up expendable income for lottery-lovers. But like many programs in society that are backed by good intentions, abusers can certainly give the truly needy a bad name.
There’s no problem that you and I, in our imaginations, couldn’t fix with enough money. The reality is that money has created so many of our world’s problems that I can’t imagine that a billion and a half dollars doing anything but causing trouble in the long run.
It takes a lot of self-discipline for human beings to avoid being “ruled” by money. I read once that the love of the stuff is the root of all evil, actually. That said, in the hands of a person who maintains power and control over it, money could be pretty useful.
The trouble: all of us think we have that kind of strength — and next to none of us actually has it.
