Lottery Obesity

I notice that this Friday’s lottery is worth $55 million plus another $12 million in extra prizes. Beyond the issue of lotteries being a tax on the poor based entirely on a greedy society, the total prize fund seems ridiculous to me.

People will still buy the tickets if the prize was capped at, say, $25 million. After all, everyone is aware that the infinitesimally tiny odds of winning don’t change dramatically with the inflated prizes. And this week alone, for example, we would have an additional $47 million to distribute to help solve some of societiy’s genuine problems — affordable housing, mental health issues, increased use of food banks, infrastructure in First Nations’ communities, etc., etc.

This would produce hundreds of millions a year spread around for the general welfare. Wouldn’t this be more worthwhile than creating a small number of extremely lucky millionaires, while still allowing the “dreams” that $25 million could bring?

Night Music: Days Like This

Poem: Southern Comfort

 

It was a slam bam thank you ma’am kind of night.

“It’s alright,” she said with a slight frisson of uncertainty perhaps

as she unwraps and taps the money-box on the dresser.

He pays to caress her, to possess her as she bumps and grinds

and too quickly finds the kind of passion paid for.

He wants more before he’ll leave: sixteen and still hard.

But she’s on guard, body barred against free love.

Push came to shove.  Above his pleas she screamed and screamed

until the apartment teemed with neighbours and passers-by

who wondered why this nigger came by and by to be in a white girl’s room.

 

It’s a warm, hormone-rushing, mosquito-swarming kind of night.

Fox-fire bright, passions tightly wound and sprung.

No brass bells are rung, no masses sung, but masses gather to enjoy

the black boy toy with the last of his time on a slippery slope

as the hempen rope grips and gropes for his hopeless neck.