What are your lucky numbers?

What are your lucky numbers? Now’s the time to pick them out – North Carolina’s lottery tickets go on sale Thursday.

The lottery has always been a sore subject in our family. I love it. Buying a lottery ticket when we lived in Wisconsin was something I looked forward to many a weekend after buying groceries. A couple of dollars bought a lot of dreams: the fun of giving the kids a couple of million dollars each; a non-stop shopping spree in Chicago; a helicopter to get around when the roads were socked in by snow. Favorite fantasies for much less than the cost of a movie.

My husband, on the other hand, is a strong lottery foe. He was disappointed when the Legislature approved it. He’s never, as far as I know, bought a lottery ticket. He doesn’t believe the state should be in the gambling business. (He’s probably right about that.) He believes the lottery sucks money away from the people who can least afford to spend a frivolous dollar.

The question of whether a person can afford to buy a ticket is not my call – or yours. That decision belongs only to the individual. It’s called personal responsibility. The government should not be making those decisions for us. If it did, tobacco, liquor, fast cars, motorcycles, fast food and dozens of other things would be illegal.

I have friends who agree with my husband. If they were guaranteed a winning ticket, I doubt they’d buy one. And that’s OK. No one is forced to play the lottery.

I’ll tell you the way I decide whether to buy a ticket on a particular weekend. The jackpot has to be at least $20 million. I won’t waste my money for anything less. (On the other hand, if the jackpot is $75 million or more, I might buy several tickets!)

My dream, since we moved to Kinston, is to win one of the really BIG jackpots -- $100 million or more, so I can buy an entire downtown block and turn it into an indoor antiques mall. Wouldn’t that be fun? We could advertise the way South of the Border advertises, or JR’s – billboards everywhere! We’d have people flocking into Kinston to buy antiques, visit our battlefields, ooh and ahh over our historic cemeteries, visit Neuse I and II and spend money in our hotels and restaurants. Kinston would bustle again, just the way it did when I was growing up in Goldsboro. (I told you fantasies are cheap!)

The thing I don’t like about our new lottery is the way the state will be using the money – not the way we were told when the bill was passed. I’ve told my state representative how I feel about that and, if you agree, I hope you will too. The governor bamboozled us all on that one. He must have been gambling that no one was paying attention.

Lee Raynor is editor of KinstonPress.com. She welcomes your comments at leeraynor@kinstonpress.com.