Some days it seems like the world is getting more and more degraded — we only use nice table manners in fancy restaurants (and eat like barbarians the rest of the time), we talk in movie theaters, we don’t know their neighbors first (let alone last) names, our food is over-processed and poisonous, TV panders to the lowest common denominator, we only expect people to pitch in if there’s “something in it for me” and so on.

But this is the most horrifying example I’ve seen yet of the complete degradation of communal life. Mark Osterloh, a Tucson, Arizona doctor, has led a drive to put an initiative on the November 2006 ballot that, if passed, would create a lottery for voting. Everyone who casts a ballot would be eligible for a $1 million jackpot, the winner to be selected at random.

Voting is a public duty. We should do it because it’s part of our communal existence, a gift from the founders — not because we might win some cash. Reducing this sacred, precious right to a state-sponsored gamble is offensive in the extreme.