We had an absolutely marvelous time … Christmas 2009 has been duly welcomed.
We went to Woodbine racetrack for our staff Christmas party last night … What a marvelous time. The staff were so professional, the space although hardly what you would call private nor intimate was so pleasant. A huge Thank you to our employer for the food and drink; both flowed, and were delicious.
It was also fascinating to watch a lot of novice bettors getting into the spirit of harmless betting on “the ponies”. There were no fortunes made (how much of a fortune can be got on a $2 bet to show), but there was a lot of fun had by all. The whoops when someone won a couple of bucks were so hilarious it put a smile on everyone’s face. I myself lost a bit, but was pleasantly surprised when I realized that we all did, and it really didn’t matter; no one’s financial life was placed in jeopardy.
After a while (I’m not good at sitting for too long), I got up and took a walk to the slots. I’ve been in gambling establishments in Vegas, and have to admit that I was not affected the way I was here. That could be a trick of time, for over time we are, through experience, impacted in different ways by similar situations; such was my experience that evening.
Walking into the room was an experience of its own, and the first feeling I had was one of … repugnance … and then I was hit by the dominant feeling in the room, and the only way I can explain it is this: a feeling of abject desperation was unmistakably palatable; it was cloying, like cheap perfume in a warm room. As I wound my way through the crowds, I spotted dozens of people tethered to the machines with what could have been room cards or credit cards, as if an umbilicus from each person “fed” the machine its meal of cash. What I found most disturbing was the look on the faces; like an episode of Rod Stirling’s “The Twilight Zone”, they were bereft of emotion … On them was the look of … hunger, want, the need to be jolted, like a junkie going for the “big fix”.
At one point I stood behind a man who proceeded to fill a machine with fifty-dollar bills to the tune of a thousand dollars, and he was going through it with what I saw as no payback at all. I do not profess to be any professional on the “art of gambling”, but I know loss when I see it, and it was everywhere in that room. You could tell the people with the five-hundred pound gorilla on their backs – I saw one woman crying because “her machine” paid out for the next guy who climbed into her seat, and she had been there all night to that point, he for about twenty minutes. I am sure this is a story that plays out all of the time in places like this, and the sadness goes on.
I have seen addiction, and I have seen it in all of its many permutations – but the worst is gambling to this degree; it ruins every life it touches in the most insidious ways: families are ruined, lives destroyed, children abandoned and left to wander while Mom and Dad go and squander the rent money, food money, etc., etc. Such desperate throwing away of money rapes marriages, defiles love, destroys human character … and it is legal.
I am not a Puritan, and I believe we all have our own ways of unwinding. I play pool online; it relaxes me after a long day, and I also have partaken in the occasional game of poker (for change) — harmless fun with friends and relatives, no hard feelings and all in the name of fun. But when one has the opportunity to go to a true gambling facility and view the truth through the eyes of someone who is truly ensconced into the “mean streets ” of gambling hell, it will leave a mark on you, it will change you in ways you have never known.
We have all heard the stories of what “The Demon of the Spin” can do to a person who is locked into the mode of “Gotta win”; we’ve heard of people who lose paycheques in an effort to “hit the Big One”, whose marriages have crumbled and died because of the need for next hit of dice or cards, of people so desperate to win that they lose their homes, and the occasional and extremely sad cumulation of loss in suicide. When life gets this huge, what chance has a person so desperate … one who believes the only out is the extinction of his own life? It could make Angels weep.
So for myself, I choose not to indulge and tempt fate; I just walk away. For me that decision is an easy one, being based on knowledge of self and an understanding of what life can be for a decision run amok. But what of all of those who are trapped in the world of spin, a veritable void of gambling — who is there to help them?
The governments of the world neither condone nor negate gambling; of course not — it is one of the single highest sources of tax revenue in the world, to the tune of billions of dollars worldwide. The human cost just doesn’t seem to outweigh the financial gains — why does this not surprise?
This attitude, from a position of government protectionism, is similar to the persepctive towards smoking; we all know that smoking is bad for us, and I’ve never met a smoker who didn’t constantly wish that he’d never picked up that first cigarette. The habit impacts a life in so many ways … Smokers are the current cultural pariahs, under constant assault on all fronts, and the most proffered question — “Well, if you know it’s so bad for you, why don’t you just quit?” – is so often asked with all intended smugness. What most don’t understand is what it takes to quit, but this is a topic for another day. My point here is that governments know smoking is bad on all levels — the health industry has been hacking at smoking-related misinformation for years – so if government officials know it’s so bad (how could they not?) and understand the ramifications, then why don’t they gut the business, burn the crops, and make smoking illegal?
Because it is also one of the biggest cash cows that the government has. Yes they make a big to-do over how much money spent on the treatment of lung disease caused by smoking, and the statement stands: get rid of the industry, get rid of the crops, and make it illegal. We all know this is just not going to happen, they have gotten too fat off the taxes and they like it.
Gambling is a similar situation; the taxes derived from gambling fuel too many other aspects of government business, and let us be honest: government has never had a hard time front-loading cost through taxes onto the general population (Canada is the most heavily taxed country in the western world), so this is not exactly a big surprise. What offends me is when politicians jump on the wagon for tax reform (usually around election time), and when an election is over, such reform seems to disappear in form if not scope from their agendas. Is it any wonder at all that as the need for income increases and more people are put out of work, that gambling increases as people become more and more desperate to try “anything” to gain a financial foothold?
There are so many more things to say in regards to this situation, like maximums on betting by an individual in any given gambling establishment, and I may hear from individuals espousing their individual right to spend their money any way they see fit. Do we in fact lose more than we gain by putting “safeguards” in place to protect those who can’t or won’t protect themselves? Well, my fellow human beings, let me say this in closing. Government was originally created as a tool for protecting a society at large; laws were put in place that as well as protecting all of us en masse, were created for the weak to be protected from grievous harm at the hands of those of nefarious means; that should be all the protection that can be afforded. How many more families need be decimated; how many more seniors lose the ability to eat and house themselves?
This I believe is a point worth thinking on; for how long can we continue to turn our backs on those who have little recourse other than gambling as a way out of the have-not realm … and into the realm of financial ruin?
We go through times in our life
