Recently, I walked into a room that I had never been in before. The room was full of money scattered all over. I noticed the bills were all $100 denominations; there were too many bills for one person to comprehend.

I summoned friends and relatives to help me with this dilemma. One of my relatives suggested we stack the $100 bills in piles of 10 with a rubber band around each pile. Soon, we were losing track of how many stacks of money we had. Someone then suggested we lay the money out in grids: 10 rows of 10 columns. That way, we would know each grid contained $100,000. It took a long time, but we laid out 10 of these grids in this fashion, which totaled $1 million. We still weren’t done. We had to repeat this 100 times. Then we realized we counted out $100 million.

In our excitement, we started to share ideas as to how we would spend all this wealth: feed hungry children, provide medication for the elderly, heat for people in cold homes, shelters for the homeless, food and clothing for …

An alarm sounded. I woke up, headed for work thinking it was only a dream. That morning, I read in the Sun Journal that my government was wasting $100 million to send a probe out somewhere past Pluto.

Then, I realized, it wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare.

Gene Gilbert, Lewiston