Excitement about the Power Ball Lottery has been lighting up TV screens all over North America. Here in the Canadian backwoods there seems to be a necessity for understanding what the happy furor is all about. I hasten to oblige. This lottery is as legal as a lottery can be because its purpose is to raise money for governments to spend in whatever ways enhance the likelihood of the re-election of state governors and continuing employment for all of their assorted minions. Although the lottery is legal and functions in a carnival atmosphere, in all but six American states, it is really a volunteer tax.
Usually, other lotteries are intended to fund good works which are not funded, or are inadequately funded, out of the public tax pot. They are a way of making minor philanthropists out of citizens who are not addicted to supporting charitable works.
When I had reached my third birthday and the tragedy of the Dirty Thirties was beginning, the Irish government decided that it could alleviate the desperate situation of the country’s hospitals with a lottery. The Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes was born. It was a nefarious enterprise in Britain, the United States and Canada, all of which had “blue laws.” Blue laws were intended to supplant the conscience of the individual with the legal pronouncements of the state. In North America and Britain, lotteries and other forms of gambling were declared to be immoral and were, therefore, illegal. In Canada, a large portion of the population considered this legislative meddling to be a Protestant conspiracy. Our Roman Catholic citizens could make a list of their misdeeds, confess them to priest and receive absolution and then be ready to start the next week’s sinning with a clean slate. Protestants didn’t have such a handy arrangement. They had to be good all the time. Having been a Protestant all the days of my life, I know how hard this can be. It has only become easier in my final years,
The Irish Sweepstake funneled money into Irish hospitals until 1934 when government leaders decided the lottery hadn’t been one of their better ideas. It was taken over by a few canny entrepreneurs, who, while pretending to raise money for hospitals, where stuffing the proceeds into their own pockets. The Irish government didn’t interfere with this arrangement because the money the rascals were raising was being invested in job-making industries. The scheme ended officially in 1987, although the legislation legalizing lotteries in Britain, the United States and Canada in the 1960s had made a big cut in the take.
The Irish Sweepstake was illegal in Canada for over 30 years. There wasn’t much hope of winning anything. Completed tickets were often intercepted at customs and destroyed – or, at least, I think they were. The money was also intercepted and turned over to the federal government – or, at least, I think that it was.
I couldn’t buy an Irish Sweepstakes ticket as a boy, I didn’t have any money. Later, I wouldn’t buy one. In fact, I have never bought a lottery ticket, but once I lost a dime in a slot machine in Nevada and once, as a teenager, I lost $17 in a poker game, but only once.
Prohibition in the United States, although instituted by a constitutional amendment, belongs in the family of blue laws. The sale of beverage alcohol was also restricted in Canada. There was no men-only beer parlour in my town until 1934. It meant the beginning of the end for five bootleggers and two moonshiners.
There weren’t just blue laws, there were blue customs. When I was a boy, men were hatless in church but women wore bonnets. This was because Saint Paul – apostle, martyr and misogynist – said so. Now, females are permitted to display their new hairdos in church. This is a smaller change among the many made in the message and the ministration of Christian churches. A single newspaper column could never deal with all the changes that have occurred in society during my lifetime. When I was a boy, laws, customs and church doctrines were restrictive. Now, I think they are too permissive. What I see around me is a pleasure seeking society in which the obligations to community which were routinely accepted in the past are routinely neglected.
