Friday, March 27, 2009

White House Easter Egg Roll Tickets

For the first time, the tickets to the White House Easter Egg Roll were not available on a first-come first-served basis. So instead of hordes of people sleeping out on the ellipse every year to be as early as possible in line for tickets, parents instead had to get lucky yesterday in checking the ticket website at a time that the website was functioning.

It is nice, I guess, that people didn't have to go to the trouble of sleeping out, but gaining a ticket became a process of luck rather than effort, or at least, luck was far more important than effort. You could basically guarantee yourself a ticket in past years; you just had to make the appropriate sacrifice (get in line early enough and sleep out). This year, effort didn't count nearly as much as luck and, sort of ironically, as being of sufficient means to be able to have access to the internet all day, something that manual laborers, cashiers, restaurant workers etc do not have.

The decreasing impact of personal effort and sacrifice upon what a person can achieve and acquire is pretty symbolic of a lot of changes in our country right now, I believe.

3 comments:

Jenny said...

well said.

Gina said...

Isn't that the truth! I was pretty miffed about the whole thing.

Nana said...

Indeed. The list of those excluded are hourly wage earners, day care workers, hospital employees....The list of those who cannot easliy access the web could be nearly endless. :(