The day I played the Florida Lottery
Until 1986, Florida was one of many states in the U.S. that still lacked a state lottery. I was just a kid then. How we managed to eke out an education without the blessings of lottery, I'll never know, but some of us had already learned enough math to figure out that there wasn't much chance in playing Florida's new games of chance.
Florida's state government has always connected its lottery with the promise of increasing funding for education. Today, for all its jingling advertisements, the lottery provides only about 6% of education funding, and that has tended to replace rather than supplement state dollars.
This meager support has come at an outsized cost to Florida's poor and marginalized. It's no coincidence that tickets carry an ominous warning to "play responsibly," as if they're akin to liquor bottles or loaded guns.
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On the Florida Lottery's official website, www.flalottery.com, I found one honest if patronizing statement amid a sea of misrepresentation: "The Lottery has become part of the very fabric of Florida, truly affecting the lives of all Floridians and providing residents with a reason to believe their dreams can come true as millions regularly enjoy 'water-cooler dreaming' with family and friends about what they would do if they won the big jackpot."
Such subtle advertising somehow never convinced me to play. Then one year I got a birthday card from a dear and thrifty friend. Inside was a gift: a $1 scratch-off ticket. Well, there was nothing to be lost, so I gave the gaudy thing a scratch.
I'd just won $5! I fancy myself a rational person, but my very first thought was that if I invested my new wealth in five more tickets, I might parlay that fiver into 25 bucks, and so on exponentially unto a prosperous early retirement.
Then I checked the odds of winning five bucks on that dollar scratch-off. It was 20-1. That prompted another irrational thought, that I was having beginner's luck.
Perhaps supernatural forces of evil had steered that winning ticket my way in an effort to create yet another gambling addict. I shuddered at the idea of horned, beet-red demons cackling as they watched eagerly from the underworld.
The next day at the supermarket, I stopped at the service desk to redeem my treasure. The first words out of the clerk's mouth were, "Are you sure you wouldn't like that in more tickets?" The thought came back: If it's this easy to win, I'd be a fool to take the cash and blow it on vegetables and whole-wheat bread.
A little demon sat on my shoulder now. "Take the tickets," it croaked. "Five chances to win!" I asked for the $5, and hurried off to escape the gravitational field exerted by the colorful wall of scratch-offs.
Every week or so, I gather the litter along my street. It's in a desperate part of town. Along with beer cans and crack baggies, scratch-off tickets blow across the ground like refugees from a routed army. I've found tickets torn into small pieces and scattered by embittered non-winners. Who can blame them? The $20 and $30 prices on some scratch-offs may represent hours of work at tough jobs.
It's no coincidence that the detritus of drugs and gambling schemes is found together. Both are diseases of despair. Patrick Henry once lost his aristocratic cool and shouted, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Today, with millions of Americans hooked on drugs, and our flag-waving governments hawking "water-cooler dreaming" tickets, a more appropriate American motto might be, "Give me lottery or give me meth!"
One can't help wondering if there's a special hell for those government officials who trick the poor into wagering the milk money. Perhaps just a purgatory where they must sweat in polyester-asbestos blend business suits until they learn to look out for their constituents instead of conspiring to corrupt them.
Whenever I pass a vending machine touting lottery tickets as if they were candy bars, I still recall that instant 400% profit. But it doesn't make me drag my feet. After all, I am one of the few people who can claim to have a perfect record playing the Florida Lottery. I'd hate to lose the bragging rights.
And my math is even better than it was in 1986.
Michael Stephens lives in Gainesville.
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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Michael Stephens: Florida Lottery gives meager support to education
