If you type Mega Millions into your address bar and click the Mega Millions link that pops up, you will be directed to a Mega Millions official page, only one that’s been frozen at 11/4/14 for two weeks–two weeks. Why, you might ask, would the home page of the State of New York’s official Mega Milliions’s page be stuck like that? I might be able to find what many of you would consider a rational explanation if I did not, in my assumption, believe that it has been planned for the website to respond this way, responding this way is meant to confuse potential winners into tearing up their winning tickets after seeing the numbers from another day. You know how most people look, and I am not trying to take away from them their responsibility to examine more carefully, although not their ticket, but an implicitly trustworthy State website. This is the principal point: it’s not that the individual is made less responsible as much as it is the State that should be recognized as complicit in this subterfuge.
Of course, everyone should check his ticket carefully, and I do, as I did, which is why I noticed that the site has been frozen for more than two weeks. There is, though, no warning from the state. The State might be assuming the people of the State trust the State and thus the State could get away with not having to pay winning tickets, that is, if the lottery tickets have been torn into pieces or irretrievably thrown away as some people do with losing tickets, the state, then, is evil, of course. Yes, the State of New York is evil if this is what they are doing, hoping that winners become losers. Any state in the union has this potential, established, we might assume, to serve the people, the common good, but actually only itself, everything it does toward its own ends and no longer the ends of the People. Any state anywhere on any continent, as every government, is in this way evil; that is, if we understand evil as not something supernatural, not exactly what we mean by the Devi, but devilish, profoundly malevolent. Are states satanic–not exactly. Evil is immoral and depraved, and in this way states can be evil in as much as depravity can come from the state, its administrators and bureaucrats, and I am not talking about individual actions where politicians are caught smoking crack or visiting houses of prostitution. I am not sure that a politician using the services of a prostitute is as depraved as the President handing out tax supported welfare to Wall Street. Specifically when organizations established to serve the People do not and in turn only serve the interests of elites or itself ahead of those of the People, or instead of the People–this is depravity. You do not still believe in Good and Evil; have we gone beyond good and evil?
In the least, I could say the State of New York is less than on the up-and-up in the measure of its alleged oversight and therefore criminal. The state is, by design or in effect, complicit in tricking the people when its website has been frozen on a past date for a couple of weeks. But let me return to my point. It is not an exaggeration to say this complicity on the part of the state is evil. It is not more so and is quite in line with how we used to say McDonald’s was evil when the news had come out nearly thirty years ago that if you lived on nothing but McDonald’s food you would suffer from malnutrition.
Corporations are not your friends–the state is not your friend; the state only another corporation meant to serve the monied elite. The state at no time is our friend; it is not your family; it can only at best be less the enemy of the people than many states have been. I wish it were different, but then we only get the government we deserve as systematically under-educated as we are and as semi-literate as our prizes of literacy are–everyone is special, though, a thought which keeps us buying lottery tickets, lottery tickets New York State seems not to want to pay.
I don’t expect any better than this assumed subterfuge from Cuomo’s New York; how can I think otherwise, thinking of the state as I do, seeing the state act or not act in this matter. I would, or I should, expect nothing from any fast-food empire, and by expecting nothing, its attempts to con the people do not surprise me. I should not expect different from anyone’s New York hereafter. I have stopped asking the government what it can do for me a long time ago because it has abandoned most of the sense it used to have concerning how to serve the People.
Hyperbole is as it has been intended. This need not be said, although, restatement is a sound rhetorical strategy, so, for as long as the repetitions are not too many, let me continue to make them. The exact number would be absurd not only to calculate, but to think that you could calculate, or that you should.
The Falling Leaf Review 