There’s something about the lure of getting something for nothing, or maybe a lot for the investment of a little bit of money as in a lottery, that makes too many of us a little bit crazy.
Decades back, I was in Cleveland, covering a Steelers preseason game on a Saturday night that coincided with the drawing of one of the first huge lottery prizes in that state that had captured national attention.
Yes, I bought a ticket or two. What amazed me was the number of Steelers players and coaches either buying tickets in advance of the game, or asking media members to purchase tickets for them due to the long lines to purchase those tickets.
Early on in the evening, either before the game or in the early moments (my memory is a bit hazy) the winning numbers were announced and the groans from thousands of fans sounded like the home team had lost the Super Bowl on the final play – not that Cleveland ever has or ever will have a Super Bowl team.
To say the game was rendered an afterthought is an understatement.
In the early days of our state’s Lotto, when you needed to pick 6 of 40 numbers to win, my wife hit upon a set of numbers based on birthdays. And until that format ended, I lived in horror that since I knew the numbers, some day they would hit and we would not have gotten around to buying a ticket.
Occasionally, I buy tickets when the lottery pots are astronomical, but not all the time even then. I recognize it for what it is, fool’s gold.
My approach to obtaining financial freedom has been to work hard, save money, and invest those savings to, as they say, let the money work for me. It’s not as exciting as winning the lottery or the Johnstown Moneyman promotion, which I understand has touched off a wave of controversy on social media.
It is, however, much more of a sure thing. I’m far from being on par with a lottery winner financially, but I was able to retire at the ripe old age of 53 ½ years of age. I don’t sit around lamenting how I’m going to pay the utility bills, either.
I also don’t participate in longshot promotions in search of a pot of gold.
But if others choose to do so, have at it. Just don’t be surprised when dreams fail to come true.
What concerns me is that Johnstown, once a town mostly populated by people who were willing to work hard and try to provide for themselves and their families, now has devolved into what seems to be a majority of those looking to get lucky, or just resorting to some degree of grifting to live off the hard work and sweat of others, either directly or through the helping hand of the government.
It’s an unseemly sight. Yet, in many cases, this has become a family “business” of sorts.
Just tonight, the wife was trying to go shopping at Aldi’s, the store with the 25-cent shopping cart deposit. Most people, my wife included, simply pass on the carts to other shoppers. But tonight, just as I’ve noticed in the rare occasions when I do the shopping, there are those who pounce on the quarters like vultures.
In this example, a kid grabbed a cart and wouldn’t let my wife have it until she had given him a quarter. The mother, or at least some pathetic sort who looked to hold that title, thought it was all very amusing. It’s probably a blessing I had stayed at home.
I’ve seen teams of teens doing the same thing at the same place, grubbing quarters! When I was a young man in this town, at the height of the baby boomer population explosion, part-time jobs were hard to get for kids. All those fellow classmates jammed into classrooms, or counterparts in other schools, were out there competing.
These days, it’s difficult to find a business that isn’t advertising for the kind of help that a teenager could provide. But it seems they’d rather stay on the government dole, play video games, and scuffle for quarters at Aldi’s.
What they, and those like them elsewhere, are learning through all this should scare anyone concerned about the future of this country. We need people to do key work, to hold down crucial jobs. Further, we need people who don’t think the government – as financed by those who do produce – or private individuals, owe them a living, no matter how unmotivated they are.
Eventually, too many people are leaning on the oars and too few people are rowing. The producers join the slackers, and it all collapses.
At this rate, we’re nearing that point sooner than many would expect.
Sam Ross Jr's site 