Money and Character

It was one of those stories where you just shake your head. You're surprised, but you're not. It is almost the perfect story for the society we live in.

An AP (Associated Press) report out of a town called "Orwigsburg" in Pennsylvania reported this: "A couple who helped steal more than $175,000 from a grocery store where they worked used that money to buy a winning $1 million lottery ticket from the same store, state police said. Joan Lechleitner, 51, and her fiancé, Kerry Titus, 54, both of Pottsville, were charged Tuesday along with two other former employees with stealing from the Agway store in Cressona ..."

The height of laziness: to win the lottery with money you stole.

But that shouldn't surprise anyone. We play the lottery for the dream of winning enough money to never have to work again. People steal, I suppose, because they think its "easier" - if you don't get caught - than working.

It’s nothing new. Wanting wealth – and lots of it – is hardly a modern-day fantasy. In every society, from the very beginning, people have tended to measure themselves by the bottom line. If it isn’t how much money they make, or have in the bank, it’s how many cattle we own, or how many sheep and goats, or how much land, or how many wives. Way back in the days of the Biblical Patriarchs – the time of Abraham – the Old Testament character Job’s wealth is measured by “… He had seven sons and three daughters, and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East. …”

The desire to have more and to have it without working for it is why so many states have lotteries - and have legalized other forms of gambling. As comedian Jeff Foxworthy says, “Rich people have investment portfolios. Red necks play the lottery.”

In the past, however, while we all longed to be wealthy, most of us kept the fantasy in perspective. We admired the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Fords and Carnegies and Morgans because they earned their money; they started businesses, took chances, created wealth. And while I know it’s not popular to admire the “Robber Barons,” they lived the uniquely American dream where anyone, regardless of birth, regardless of parentage, regardless of social status, could – with enough ingenuity and hard work and imagination – rise above their social status and become rich.

Yes, according to the “new sensibility” of Political Correctness, we’re supposed to abhor people like Vanderbilt because he and his ilk abused their workers and manipulated the system and kicked puppies and stole cupcakes from little kids’ birthday parties that they then sold for obscene profits to other little kids who didn't know any better. But the point is, those men represented what used to be “the American Dream,” that of coming from nothing to incredible success – no different than Steven Jobs or Bill Gates or the Koch brothers or the inventor of the “Go-Pro.”

Hunger is a great motivator. When people are hungry, whether for basics like food and shelter or hungry for luxury, they are often driven to do something to get it. That's why capitalism has created more wealth and changed the fortunes of more people, moving more people from poverty to wealth, than any other system devised by man.

While for centuries it was certainly acceptable to play make-believe and imagine what it would be like to find out you were the lost heir to a gold mine or the last living distant relative of a king, we always looked at those who tried the shortcut as fools, easy prey for scam artists and con men.

We were taught that nothing good comes easy. One makes something of oneself by setting goals and working to achieve them; that character is ultimately what counts. I might be poor, but I could be proud - not of being poor, but of my character and reputation (even while striving and dreaming of no longer being poor).

In the Southern Baptist world that I grew up in, gambling was looked down on – and included everything from raffles to playing the stock market.

Once, when I was playing Little League baseball, we were given raffle tickets to sell as a means to raise money for the league. My mother wrote a strongly worded letter to the league and park authorities letting them know that a raffle was gambling (buying a $2 ticket in the hope of winning a $100 color TV, or whatever the prize was), and not the kind of lesson she wanted her son to learn. She said she understood the league needed money to operate, and she’d find another way of paying our families’ share if they only gave us a dollar amount. But she was NOT going to have her son participate in gambling.

Interestingly enough, the next year the park had us back to selling Krispy Kreme donuts. That taught us salesmanship, and the people who gave us money got something of value in return rather than a "chance" at something of greater value.

I’m not sure there are many people so dedicated to their principles like that anymore – including me.

I live in a state that does not have a lottery, and that, so far, every time the idea has come up for a vote it has been defeated. But it continually comes up because more and more it is seen as the ‘quick fix’ to the state’s financial problems. The advocates point out the "missing" revenue for this state based on surrounding states that have lotteries; to the large numbers of people who leave this state to go to bordering states to buy lottery tickets. They argue that no one is making people who have an objection (I almost said "moral" objection, but those advocate would not recognize a moral objection to gambling) buy lottery tickets; they say nobody gets hurt.

I would argue there are “moral” objections, and that if a state feels gambling is the solution to its fiscal problems, then why shouldn’t the rest of us stop working and put our hope in gambling to solve our financial problems, too? Why doesn’t the state buy lottery tickets from other states – heck, from every other state? (That sort of happened, in that recent lottery that hit a billion dollars, I remember some small country in the Carribean or Central America bought tickets). For that matter, why shouldn’t the state come to the aid of that Nigerian prince who is trying to send me millions of dollars?

It’s not as if most of us are faced with the choice of either buying a lottery ticket or providing fresh water to third-world countries. If we don’t buy a lottery ticket, we’re probably not going to use that money on helping feed the hungry or warm the cold. We'd just use it on some other luxury item. Of course, that luxury item would more than likely be a product sold by a salesman who gets a commission; a product developed by a company that uses its profits to pay its workers and pay taxes - the kind of economic ripple effect that keeps society prospering.

Truthfully, most of us have grown up watching TV game shows here if we guess the right number we win fabulous prizes; or watching people who can run fast or throw fast or dominate another human being physically receive reward for that talent far beyond their actual contribution to a better society.

We see so many people around us who seemingly “have it made” that we feel like losers for not being able to afford the new car, the complete cable TV package, the latest cell phone, the Disneyworld vacation. People feel like fools for not getting their share.

And so we see a couple who rob a store, take the winnings and play the lottery, and win.

Who does it hurt? I think this obsession with wealth for its own sake, without concern about how it is achieved, hurts us all. And I think we see that almost everywhere we look in our country today. People who don’t really try to get jobs to come off unemployment; people who get jobs but find it inconvenient to show up on time (if at all); people who realize it’s easier to take money from the rest of us (filtered through the government, of course, so it’s legal) and then work for cash in the huge and unregistered underground economy.

I’m reminded of an old joke.

A guy walks into a bar, starts up a conversation with an attractive girl, and eventually says, “Would you go home and sleep with me for a million dollars?” The woman says, “A million dollars? Sure.” Then he says, “How about for twenty dollars.” To which the woman says with great indignation, “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
The man answers, “Oh, I thought we’d already established that. Now we’re just haggling over price.”

What kind of people are we? I fear we're quickly establishing that, too.