Let them eat cake

I asked my good acquaintance Vicki at a Kent 7-Eleven if she had won the Mega Millions lottery. Well, no, but she did tell me that $2,500 in tickets were sold on her shift the day of the drawing. I heard on the day after the drawing—for a payout of approximately $640 million—that $1.5 billion in tickets had been sold since the last time there was a winner; that’s a lot of extra cash for states to spend on education (or rather, their budget deficits). There were three people who picked winning tickets, and another half-dozen who had five numbers, worth $250,000. I have to admit that I’ve never bought a lotto ticket in my life, although I have dreamt of the time that I would on a whim I buy a $1 ticket, and become an instant multi-millionaire. What would I do with all that dough? Probably find an apartment in an earthquake and sound-proof zone, buy another computer (maybe a Mac this time), a widescreen HD TV, a cable subscription, a couple more DVDs and Blu-ray disks that I have some need for (“Chinatown” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” are coming out on Blu-ray this month!!!), buy healthy food, purchase adequate health insurance, and work on my blog. And I’d probably give my parents some money. That’s it. I have no other ambition. I’d have a lot of unused funds in my bank account; I think I would set-up some charitable foundation in my name, not to fund playthings of the rich like the symphony, ballet or opera, but something that would aid the less well-off.

Short of winning the lottery, I’m the only charity case I know. There are a lot of people in my leaky boat all over this country. These people have not seen a raise in, say, three years despite the fact that company that pays the bills has seen record profits in the past two years. Of course the employees who belong to unions (mostly in the meet-and-greet jobs) must be kept happy for all the “sacrifices” they have made, so they are expected to receive generous bonuses. The people who are not union employees, who sacrificed more to help in the creation of that profit, have to be satisfied with a patronizing pat on the back and a thin slice of cake—and figure out how to make due while the price of everything continues to go up, and up.