I’m writing this on the eve of a Power Ball drawing that could conceivably give a prize of 700 million dollars to a ridiculously lucky winner …. which would be (I believe) the single largest lottery payment in history. (And if there is no winner, the next potential prize climbs even higher.) It’s one of those moments that sends many of us scurrying to our favorite convenience store to get in on the fun …. including some of us who almost never engage in such activity under more normal circumstances. I’m one such person – with one Power Ball ticket neatly folded and in my wallet. (You know I’m serious about something when that something ends up in my wallet. Most of my time I’m walking around with cash hanging out of most of my pockets.) I won’t be glued to my TV for the announcement- I’ll only pay attention if I hear on the news that there is a winning ticket and that it was sold in Racine, WI. Of course, it’s more likely that the winner (if there is a winner) will be from Winnetka, Illinois- or Casper, Wyoming- or Portland, Maine. And even if the winning ticket were sold in Racine, there are probably more than one hundred outlets selling such tickets, morning to night. And even if the winning ticket were sold in “my” store (Georgetown Convenience) even that wouldn’t mean that I was the winner. No matter how you slice it, the chances of any of us being the winner are astronomically remote. Most of us are smart enough to know that- are smart enough to know that the two dollars we’re plunking down for a ticket is basically money we are flushing down the drain.
And yet we do it. Why?
I can only speak for myself. I do it because I hate to be left out of something that has millions and millions of people so excited. I do it because it feels like a slightly crazy thing to do – and I’m one of those buttoned-up types who rather rarely does much of anything crazy, especially in public. Buying a lottery ticket is a way for me to engage in some slightly crazy activity- and I can be completely private about it (except when I start blogging about it!) And I do it because for as foolish as it might seem to spend money for the sake of such astronomical odds, it’s feels more foolish still not to at least be in the game. If you buy no ticket, you have absolutely no chance whatsoever – or Absolute Zero chance, as I like to put it. If you buy one, you have increased your odds as much as a reasonable person can increase them – from Absolute Zero to Practically Zero. Beyond that, any additional purchase seems to me like money completely and stupidly wasted because your chance of winning remains Practically Zero, even after you’ve spent money on 10, 20, 50 or even 100 tickets. (I cringe when I think of people caught up in Lottery Fever who spend money they don’t have in such pointless fashion.) But one ticket? That amount of foolishness I can live with.
There’s one other reason- but it’s a somewhat scary reason that I almost hate to admit. I think one of the reasons people do this is for the Rush Of Imagination that it inspires …. the Crazy Dreaming that we cannot resist. I have to tell you that part of me gets some kind of charge out of imagining what it would feel like to win such an extraordinary prize. I have told Kathy that the very first thing I would do – right after screaming, crying, fainting, and (I hope) reviving – is call our good friend Stephen Smith, who is a highly regarded attorney in town. I wouldn’t want to do one single thing without sitting down with him. Assuming everything checked out and we were really winners and he gave us the go-ahead, we would quietly call our family members and very closest friends and share the news in strictest confidence …. call in sick the next day for our jobs ….. and sit down to think about what we would announce to the world in terms of our intentions. Ultimately, we would do all of the normal things that most people do ….. pay off our house and all of our current debts, give significant gifts to our church, to our alma maters, endow some scholarships, make reservations for a huge trip to England in celebration of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary …. and then what?
That’s when it gets even crazier – and more complicated. We would want to do something good for our family members and close friends …. but how? Even Steven across the board or according to need? How would we sort that out? (It’s when I start thinking about this that my stomach first begins to hurt.) And how would that change the dynamic of our various friendships? We would want to do something to nudge Carthage (where I teach) to finally take the plunge and build the long-awaited Fine Arts Center. Would we give enough to have the building named after us? How weird to contemplate. Almost weirder is to think about President Woodward coming to call on us, showing us the deference due to potential Big Time Donors. The world would feel as if it had been turned upside down. What about causes near and dear to our hearts, either singly or collectively. For instance, we both care deeply about the Racine Theater Guild – so that would have to be part of the mix. But when it comes to the Metropolitan Opera or the Lyric Opera of Chicago, I’m pretty sure that my passion for the cause outstrips Kathy’s by a margin of 50 to 1. Would there be any sort of tug of war? Would it suddenly matter that it was ME who bought the ticket, not Kathy? It’s scary to think of how easily or quickly this could become a rift. And that’s not even counting the crazy things that I might want to do with the $$$ such as ….. bankroll a national tour of my favorite play, John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” – starring Cherry Jones – and also bankroll a PBS taping, so her performance could be preserved for all time. OR single-handedly underwrite a brand new Broadway show. Maybe composed by me! There’s another scary thought- that this kind of money might allow one to shove open doors and wrench opportunities out of the hands of others more deserving of such a chance – and fuel what is one of the most unattractive of human characteristics: a sense of entitlement.
Yes, the longer I think about this amazing, crazy scenario, the more uncomfortable I become. It makes me realize that there is almost something obscene about the amount of money that this payoff represents – and that it would be bound to change one’s life in ways one could scarcely comprehend, let alone manage well. For as exciting as it would be, for as tremendous an opportunity it would offer for – e.g. – paying off our church’s debt or underwriting our favorite PBS or NPR program with “a gift from the Gregory Berg and Kathleen Berg Foundation” – there is way too much potential for the life I love so much to be radically and irreversibly altered.
Of course, there’s something a bit absurd about expending a single solitary second worrying about something that will not happen. And the certainty of that was confirmed for me just this afternoon when I clicked on a link shared on Facebook by a former voice student of mine named Max Dinan. The link was to something called the Powerball Simulator 2.0 – and it allows you to see in graphic fashion just how astronomically remote the possibility is of winning even mid-size prizes, let alone the Big One. When you click on this link and set the simulator in motion, it begins “buying” you lottery tickets at breakneck speed of approximately 10 tickets per second – each set of numbers randomly selected – and you can keep track in the graph of how many tickets you end up purchasing before winning your first $4 prize ….. or $7 prize …. or $100 or $10,000 or $1,000,000. Appropriately enough, it’s at the bottom of the screen that one finds the proverbial Bottom Line ….. how much money spent in purchasing tickets, how much gained in winnings, and the net profit or loss.
I clicked on it at 12:30 this afternoon – watched for about three minutes, transfixed – and then headed off to Carthage for Opera Workshop. It was several hours later when I revisited it for the first time and saw these numbers, at 5:15 p.m. –
Over $15,000 spent on tickets. Winnings? $1,209. Net Loss? You can see the ugly number for yourself. I went back to work on something else, and returned to find these numbers at 5:27:
Just over 10,000 tickets purchased – at a cost of just over $20,000 and $1,655 in winnings – with not one single winning ticket at the more reasonable level of $10,000, (I think a lot of us imagine those prizes being awarded all the time- much more frequently than in fact they are) let alone the higher amounts. And a few minutes later, at 6:09:
You get the picture. In the world of such lotteries, our chances of winning are ludicrously low. And it really doesn’t sink in until you go on a website like this and watch these numbers flash in front of your eyes – most of the numbers changing with astounding rapidity except those zeroes in the Winning Tickets column. Those remain stubbornly in place even after 15,000+ tickets have been purchased.
So there it is. Power Ball is about Crazy Dreams …. about flirting with the possibility that one’s whole life and one’s own impact on the world could be drastically altered in an instance from something as simple as a $2 lottery ticket. For somebody out there, that Crazy Dream is soon to come true- but it won’t be you and it won’t be me. Whoever it is, I hope their wild ride leaves them off in a happier place than where they began, and I hope that they find a way to make someone else happy as well.
6:43:
It looks like it’s time to think about some other dreams.
<If you want to visit the PowerBall simulator for yourself, this is the link on which you click:
http://powerball-simulator.com/
You may learn something. I know that I did.>