An 84-year-old woman named Gloria Mackenzie, living a
retired, secluded life in some small Florida town, won the recent $590 million
Powerball lottery, settling for a lump-sum payment of $370 million. Some people
may look at the number and say “Wow, that’s a grand amount of money” without
realizing just exactly how much that it is. Let’s try this number:
$370,000,000. Try spending that in a year. How much is it? On my wages, it
would take me 15,000 years to make
that amount of money. I doubt that billionaires have that amount of liquid cash
on hand. Putting it another way, that would be enough to pay similar wages for
15,000 people in one year.
Mackenzie has hired a team of lawyers and financial advisers
about what to do with all that money, since at this stage in her life there is
only so much a lot of money can do. Maybe she’ll give some it to charity,
set-up a philanthropic foundation, or make all her kin instant millionaires in
her will. She supposedly lives in little more than a shack with a tin roof,
which is a far cry from the townhouses in manicured suburban neighborhoods
where the winners of the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes always seemed to
live. But I wonder what she was thinking when she bought those five tickets;
did she actually think she’d win? Did she ever stop to consider what she would
do with all that money if she did? If the amount was “only” $2 million, she
could still live very comfortably the rest of her natural life.
I might as well just crawl to my point. It makes me fairly
ill to think that we live in a society where people place their hopes on that
(mostly) elusive jackpot so that they can quit the game of life and start play
without rules like the rest of us schmucks. I stand in line waiting to buy some
money orders to pay bills, and I’m watching some older fella spending $200 on
lotto tickets; he probably won’t win anything, but that won’t stop him or
anyone else from chasing the dream of instant wealth. I’ve never bought a lotto
ticket, partly because I don’t have money to waste, but mostly because I wonder
what kind of person I will become if I win a huge jackpot. If I did, I might move into a decent
apartment, maybe buy a car, update my home entertainment, and travel. One thing for certain is that I could purchase real health insurance.
But what else would it do to me? Would it make me
complacent? Make me unconcerned about the world around me because it is no
longer one I recognize? Of course, I could use the money to support causes I
believe in, like social justice and education. But what I would fear most is
that I would no longer feel the outrage at the world around me that fuels my
need to have my voice heard through writing—which frankly is the only thing
that gives my miserable little life meaning. If I had won
that $370 million, it would just be about the money, and what to do with it.
Instead of feeling this constant need to describe the world as I see it—when most assume that people
like me have no opinion worth their bother—I’d likely allow the money to talk,
for better or worse. I would be just be a façade of a meaningful person, having
done nothing to justify the creation of sudden wealth. I’d feel like a fraud,
the same invisible person that other frauds of a different kind walk past on
the sidewalks.
So while I’d like to have more money than I do now and live
a “normal” existence, what is more important is keeping in touch with the
reality that for every $370 million winner, there are many millions more
toiling in various levels of want and deprivation. I identify with them; I would
never wish to “identify” with the idle or semi-idle rich and have any sense of
what it means to be human.
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