Feel Better For A Buck – Guaranteed

If you watch even a small amount of local television, the stuff you can get on cable and for free over-the-air, one, you are part of an audience in decline, and two, you probably have noticed an influx of lottery and gambling ads.

Outside of the automotive industry, lotteries and gaming must be television's largest advertising category, or so it seems.

They are spending millions of dollars to show us how much better our lives could be – like we don't already know. Fewer groceries cost more. Threadbare clothes must last longer. For possibly the first time in generations, generations of people have stopped dreaming of being first-time home owners.

And for as little as one dollar, your entire world could change; but you can't win if you don't play.

What does it say about today? About this time in which we are living?

We have just experienced one of the most unsettling periods in recent history and it has been made worse by extremely negative social discourse, a growing disregard for others, a disdain and even hate for the other side, misanthropy, and not "fake news" but outright lies being treated as news by real and fake media.

What does that say about us? Clearly someone, or some people, believe that we will pretty much buy anything, figuratively and literally, that we can be manipulated – are being manipulated – and it's not only okay, it's good for their bottom line. Maybe this has always been the case, but it's never been truer.

In place of solutions, we are being ghosted, peddled excuses, and sold false hope.

Are people so dispirited, that selling the dream of winning a big payday – which is an outright lie to 99.9 percent of us – is the way out of the situation? People aren't dreaming of winning; they're hoping to survive.