Ladders And The Lotto

• Natasha Scantlebury, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2014

Our place in the world is like a lotto, a raffle for who lives where, in what situation. In some ways, it's accurate. You don't choose the number on your ticket. Whatever you get, you're stuck with, and in the millions of raffle tickets, and there are few winning tickets.
Who's in charge of handing out tickets, of choosing which ticket wins or of organising the prizes? The answer to this is one of the many things that spilt humankind. So many people believe that this is the role of a God, or of fate. I used to say that I'm a humanist, one who stresses the potential good of humans without believing in a higher power, but I stopped when I realised that humans aren't good. And that's my answer to who the ticket holders are; I don't know who's in power, but it isn't us.
Yet the lotto of life is rigged. It's too easy for some people to win and others to lose. The lotto isn't random, because I know that if we were reshuffled so that everything was equal, for a single, blissful second that the same people would rise to the top. And some people sink to the bottom of the ladder, because they've lost the strength and the confidence that they'll be able to stay in the middle.
Imagine all the humans in the world had to stand on one long ladder, leaned against the Earth. If you've got people at the top, you need people at the bottom. If everyone's in the middle of the ladder, the ladder snaps and the whole thing collapses. If there's too many people at the top, the ladder falls over. If everyone is at the bottom of the ladder, there will always be the few strong ones who push past in a race to the top, and when they get to the top, they'll always wish the ladder was taller.
If the Earth was a ladder, most people would be at the bottom and middle of the ladder, keeping it stable. But there's a few, who would be at the top of the ladder. They're building the ladder higher, higher than it is safe to go. They don't worry about falling. They don't worry about the ladder being unbalanced, because there are so many people at the bottom. The people at the bottom don't know how to climb the ladder. So there's no worries about too many people being at the top. And if ever someone dares to climb...the people at the top will gladly push them down.
This is how I see humans. I hope you surprise me, that you change, that you teach each other how to climb and how to balance. But we are humans. We won't change.