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LotteriesJanuary 09, 2006 Been thinking a lot about lotteries lately, which of course made me think of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Haven't reread it in many years, but it's not a story you forget, even if some of the details and most of the names slip your memory after a while. The lotteries I've been thinking about are more benign. I guess. I'm not sure. I don't play the lottery. Years ago, a friend gave me some scratch tickets for my birthday. These won me a few bucks, which I "re-invested" and won a few more bucks and pretty soon I was buying tickets every time I went to Cumby's and then before I knew it I was down about 15 bucks. Immediately I saw that I had no control over scratch tickets and I gave up buying them. This doesn't stop me from saying, when a bunch of us get down to serious fantasizing, "Yeah -- when I win the lottery." We're all waiting for our ships to come in, even though our ships never left the harbor. On the other hand, my chances of winning the lottery are only marginally improved if I actually buy myself a ticket. I've been thinking about affordable housing on Martha's Vineyard. (See how I'm not giving in to my temptation to write "affordabull housing"?) An awful lot of affordable housing on Martha's Vineyard is distributed by lottery, but it's much harder to play the housing game than it is to buy a scratch ticket at Cumby's. You have to fill out forms, talk to bankers, and generally figure out what you can come up with in the way of a down payment and a mortgage. If you jump through all the hoops and come up with the right numbers, your name goes into the box along with two, three, four dozen others, and if you're lucky, really lucky, if your stars line up right and your rabbit's foot hasn't lost its charm, maybe your name will see the light of day and you'll win yourself a plot of land and the right to spend a big hunk of money on a house. Is this any way to run an island? The writer's world is full of contests. Entry fees can run as high as $25 for a short story or a few poems -- there's a contest for novels whose prize is publication with a major trade publisher and whose entry fee is $125 -- and the payoff is publication and maybe a few hundred bucks. Contests aren't exactly lotteries --your work is being read by real people and measured against that of other entrants -- but you know nothing about those people or their qualifications so, yeah, literary contests are a lot like lotteries. I loathe contests for pretty much the same reason that I avoid lotteries, but at the moment The Mud of the Place is entered in one contest whose prize includes publication with a reputable publisher and "My Terrorist Eye" was the writing sample I submitted for a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in nonfiction. (Wish me luck.) Long time ago the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom put out a poster that's still around: it says, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." Bake sales, raffles: you know the drill, you've probably baked a few brownies and sold a few tickets over the years; you've probably bought a few too. Over the years I've seen a few militarists freak out over this poster. Bluster bluster bluster it's irresponsible, it's unpatriotic, it's dangerous to entrust our national defense to BAKE SALES. I'm not wild about entrusting our education, our culture, or the housing of my fellow islanders to bake sales, raffles, and lotteries either. Or about education and social services riding on the back of casino gambling and betting at racetracks -- but don't get me started. If we really valued these things, we wouldn't be leaving them to chance. But hey, at least no one's getting stoned.
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