Ticket of Hope | Teen Ink

Ticket of Hope

May 21, 2009
By mmpritchard SILVER, Longmont, Colorado
mmpritchard SILVER, Longmont, Colorado
5 articles 10 photos 8 comments

I was in the grocery store with my mom shopping. While we were waiting for our deli order, I was watching a women standing at the lottery ticket machine. She was aged and looked like she had had a rough and strenuous life. She scratched ticket by ticket hoping to win something, but each time she got more and more disappointed. By the time she had scratched nearly ten lottery tickets, she walked to a trashcan, threw them all away, and continued with her life.






The one thing that keeps people going and moving forward is the hope that one day; they will have a better life. Whether it’s financially or socially, we all are living to one day get to something better. We all hope day by day that all our hard work will pay off for something.

The woman in the store at the ticket machine was one of those people. Her ragged clothes suggested that she had been through some financial hardship and that the ticket was the one thing that would solve all of her problems. This is why many people come back day after day to that one machine. In the eyes of many people, the machine is what carries them through life.

I believe that hope is important. Without it, many people would not be able to find anything to live for or look forward to. It might be a typical kid watching Dora the Explorer hoping one day to be an adventurer or a fisherman wanting the best fishing boat. Either way, we all consciously or unconsciously hope for something better in our own personal way.

The one thing that makes the lottery business so successful is that someone has to win. Out of the millions of people that play the game, some people will win something. So, people think that they will win the big one, one day, if they play long enough. It gets people like my grandpa who had been playing it for years and years and people like the woman in the store. However, reality is that most people will never win any amount that would cover the cost of actually buying all the tickets.

This is also, what drives me to keep moving forward and doing well in school. In the end, good grades, a good attitude, and the hope for something good to happen will hopefully pay off.
THIS I BELIEVE.


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on Jul. 24 2009 at 8:37 pm
mmpritchard SILVER, Longmont, Colorado
5 articles 10 photos 8 comments
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