Annnnd the winning numbers arrrrre…
The Mega Millions lotto went down a few weekends ago, and I was eating guacamole and fajitas with friends and washing it down with cerveza as they called the winning numbers. Nobody at our table won, unless you consider that guacamole a win (which I did, along with the Texas-style mesquite fajitas). There were many winners that night all over the country, but I’m pretty sure the big winner was an airline flight attendant from Illinois. The state of Illinois is fortunately one of the states that doesn’t require a posting of the winner and actually allows anonymity, which is a good thing! People will come crawling out of the woodwork as soon as they publish your name, and winners have attested to this nightmare to the point many published winners have to go into hiding and become a recluse.
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| She cuts her teeth on wedding rings in the movies |
I had always heard, in passing, about the curse of the lottery, but I never really actually believed it. I thought maybe it was one of those urban legends serving to detract you from doing anything remotely fun. As with most rabbit holes, I immediately jumped down, and I started researching the lottery curse on my phone. And, I quickly realized that, like the actual lottery itself, the odds ain’t really in your favor. Wasn’t it Ambrose Bierce who said that the lottery is nothing more than a tax on stupid people? But then the reciprocal argument would be: you can only win if you play! It’s almost like a government-run social experiment to show how free money can’t build wealth or buy happiness, even when it’s straight handed to you in enormous lump sums, minus all the taxes that go right back into to the government-run social experiment which is around 40% of your earnings.
First, statistically speaking, over 70% of winners are destitute and miserable within 7 years of cashing in. Seven in ten people fair WORSE after winning the lottery than their simple and peaceful lives before the big win! Have you ever seen the movie “A Simple Plan” with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton? It’s one of my favorite movies themed around “the things that you own end up owning you.”
From really strong marriages completely crumbling to people’s lives being destroyed to the very core, there are not very many long-term happy endings produced from lottery winnings. Probably the worst one I read about was Abraham Shakespeare, from Tampa, Florida. With a birth name like that, you know his life would turn out stranger than fiction. He was an illiterate black man, an hourly manual laborer, who randomly won the $30 million lottery in 2009, and his life legit came unglued. He was riding with some other workers that day and went in to buy a drink and use the restroom and fatefully bought a lottery ticket.
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| Abraham Shakespeare |
Suddenly, out of nowhere this blonde woman, Dorice Moore, with an unbeknownst history of being a transient and a shyster, befriended him with promises to grow his earnings. And, by 2010 ol’ Abraham vanished into thin air. It’s like he fell off the earth. He went missing, and nobody, not even his family knew where he was. They found “poor” Abraham in a block of concrete buried in the back yard after using ground penetrating sonar. Dorice is serving a life sentence for the murder of Abraham with no chance of parole.
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| Abraham published on his big day and Dorice the psychopath… |
Sometimes you think the lottery will solve everything, but the truth is, the odds are not great at all. Many winners have attested that they wished they had immediately ripped up their lottery ticket!
May the odds forever be in your favor,
Kimmie
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