Man… today I was at associated grocery store which is located in a strip mall across the street from my building. I went grocery shopping with my wife. I was contemplating how Starrett City has evolved over the years from being a false ideal of Utopian white middleclassdom to becoming increasingly section-8. I knew things were starting to get ghetto when a Chinese Fast food joint and a foot locker came to the shopping center. But that’s cool, but whats not cool is what you can find in the associated supermarket. In the last aisle there is a special line for Lotto. Not only is there a long lotto line, there are 3 huge vending machines for instant scratch lotto games. These machines take 1 dollar bills for half a million in prize money, 5 dollars for 1 million, 10 dollars for 2 million, 20 dollars for 500 million. While in line I noticed mostly older African American men and women paying for their groceries and then taking the remainder of their money to these machines to buy tickets. This one man was putting in all these different one dollar bills and the machine just wasn’t accepting it. I went up to him and told him “That’s a blessing that it won’t take it, that’s your hard earned money don’t waste it”. He replied “But I might win”. I responded by saying “Use your money on yourself, you worked hard for that money”. He respond again by saying “but I might win”. I just shook my head hoping others listening would think about what was happening in front of them. My wife commented by saying this is a vicious cycle. What I understood from her comment was that these people are already poor and they are robbed by these allusions that they can become rich quick, and towards that end they blow alot of their money (which they don’t have an abundance of) in these false hopes. While I was walking home I saw an ad in the travel agency window which said “Daily Trips to Atlantic City”. The only thing that’s worse than the long line of people buying lotto tickets, is the long lines in front of liquor stores in the ghetto.

btw check out: http://savestarrettcity.org/

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