“It’s a Gamble”
Sermon
for the Unitarian Universalist Church of
Winchendon,
Massachusetts
September
17, 2005
the
Rev. Jennie Ann Barrington
The Morning Reading,
from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius [pp. 32-33]:
“…always
to define whatever it is we perceive --to trace its outline-- so we can
see what it really is: its substance. Stripped bare. As a whole.
Unmodified. And to call it by its name-- the thing itself and its
components, to which it will eventually return. Nothing is so conducive
to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis
of everything that happens to us. To look at it in such a way that we
understand what need it fulfills, and in what kind of world-- and its
value to that world as a whole and to man in particular-- as a citizen
of that higher city, of which all other cities are mere households.
What is it-- this thing that now forces itself on my notice? What is it
made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I
need to bring to bear on it-- tranquillity, courage, honesty,
trustworthiness, straightforwardness, independence, or what? So in each
case you need to say: “This is due to God” or “This
is due to the interweavings and intertwinings of fate, to coincidence,
or chance” or “This is due to a human being. Someone of the
same race, the same birth, the same society, but who doesn’t know
what nature requires of him. But I do. And so I’ll treat them as
the law that binds us --the law of nature-- requires. With kindness and
with justice.”
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The
Morning Sermon:
As a religious leader,
should I object to gambling?
Our church benefits
from raffles, and our “100 Club” lottery; so does the
Winchendon Kiwanis Club, of which I’m delighted to be a member;
so do so many non-profit, cultural, and educational organizations which
are enriching people’s lives. When is gambling a good thing? When
is gambling unethical? Some people have begun to notice that I tend to
be less than enthusiastic about gambling and other games of chance. My
hand is not the first to go up when a group is asked to sell tickets.
Since some people have noticed my disinterest in gambling and asked me
about it, this morning is a good time to share with you why I’m
not one to gamble, along with some facts about what legalized gambling
has metastasized into-- while we, our neighbors, and most neglectfully
our government officials have failed to pay close enough attention.
When I was a little
girl, we’d go up to my grandparents old farmhouse in rural Maine
several times a year. My grandmother had toys up there for me to play
with-- board games, “barrel of monkeys,” cards, and
modeling clay. Most precious to me, she had, in a box on the floor of a
closet, a gray felt bag filled with many-colored glass marbles, which
by now would be considered antiques. I treasured those marbles. I
wanted to bring them back with me to Massachusetts, but the toys at my
grandmother’s house were supposed to stay at my
grandmother’s house, so they’d be there for us to play with
the next time we visited. That’s a little bit hard for a
five-year-old to understand, so my mother and grandmother let me bring
just a few of them home. I brought them to school, showing them proudly
to the other children. At recess, a boy was playing marbles in the
dirt. In all fairness, he explained the rules of the game to me. It
looked like it would be so easy to win marbles that were even bigger
and more beautiful than the ones I already had. So I tried my hand at
it. And by a few painful moments later, I’d lost my
grandmother’s marbles. A resolution clarified in my young mind:
From now on, watch out! So you don’t end up feeling this
heartsick again.
Then when I was about
nine years old, which would have made my brother about eleven, he and
his friends were playing poker and I asked them how you play. They
couldn’t be bothered to explain all the complexities of the rules
to me, so they told me to pull up a seat and just try for pairs and
several of the same suit. I kept discarding and picking up, discarding
and picking up, failing to acquire even one set of pairs in my hand.
Eventually I folded and just lay my cards down face up, figuring
I’d lost. My brother and his friends started yelling all at once,
exclaiming things like, “How did you do that?!”
“Winner’s luck!” and “I’m never playing
with you again!” What I, in my ignorance, had laid down was a
royal flush. That bizarre incident scared me even more than losing my
grandmother’s marbles had-- Winning simply due to dumb luck
confuses everybody and alienates a person from individuals and groups.
I’ve never wanted to play poker since.
These two stories
illustrate that even the most closely-supervised child is going to
learn what gambling feels like during those brief playtimes when adults
are out of their sphere. I tell them to you this morning so
you’ll know why I’m so cautious about gambling. But they
also serve as a point in time from which we can measure how much our
culture has changed. Gambling is everywhere, now- everywhere I look,
and I’m not even looking for it. In January of 2006, The Center
for Arizona Policy wrote, in their policy brief, “Harms of
Legalized Gambling:”
“The
availability of legalized gambling, primarily casino gambling, exploded
during the 1990s. In 1990, legalized casinos operated in two
jurisdictions-- Nevada and Atlantic City. By 2004, there were 411
Indian-run casinos in 28 states, with more than half of the 341
federally recognized tribes running casinos. Research studies and
government statistics repeatedly show that the arrival or expansion of
gambling opportunities cause significant social problems, including
increased bankruptcies, suicides, gambling addictions, divorces, child
abuse, child neglect, domestic violence, and overall crime….. In
Indiana, a review of the state’s gaming commission records
revealed that 72 children were found abandoned on casino premises
during a 14-month period. In Louisiana and South Carolina, children
died after being locked in hot cars for several hours while their
caretakers gambled. Cases of child abandonment at Foxwoods Casino in
Ledyard, Connecticut became so commonplace that authorities were forced
to post signs in the casino’s parking lots warning parents not to
leave children in cars unattended….. The crime rate in Minnesota
counties with casinos accelerated over 200% faster than in counties
without casinos….. The annual number of police calls jumped over
400% within the five years after the opening of the Foxwoods
Casino.”
I’ve never been
to Foxwoods. But –you will be surprised to hear-- this summer I
went to Mohegan Sun with the Kiwanis Club, for the fun of camaraderie
with them --which was a lark, I’m happy to report-- and to see
for myself what all the rage of casinos is all about. I bet a little
and won a little, but that’s beside the point. I went to look
right at this phenomenon that scares me, so I could know that I can
trust myself not to go wild letting money I can’t afford to lose
slip away from me. Some of my impressions from that trip:
As soon as we enter
the doors, we hear that multi-tonal hum of the machines. The hum
increases as we walk from the waiting area to the “Hall of Lost
Tribes.” It isn’t even interesting music; it’s
unpleasant, and it bugs me. The atmosphere promotes our acting
individualistically, and precludes intimate conversation. When you walk
way into one of those rooms, there’s a low wall all around you,
so in order to get out of the room again, you have to walk through the
middle of all the slot machines. There’s no sunlight, no clocks;
people stay there for twenty-four hours straight. And the games are not
as easy or simple as I would have thought-- To a novice, the rules are
complicated-- tickets, cards, fifties, hundreds, mortgages…
Everyone who was there had to learn to play these games somehow, from
someone. How do children learn to do this? From adults. The kids arcade
is called Kids Quest. They get tickets for prizes as though
they’ll eventually “graduate” to real slot machines.
The wildly popular kids-themed restaurant “Chucky Cheese”
comes to mind. Does bringing children there cultivate the habit of
gambling unnecessarily and too young? Mohegan Sun has fake
southwestern-ish décor, including fake pine trees. The rooms are
named “Casino of the Earth” and “Casino of the
Sky” (It’s only one floor up). Slogans flash at us like,
“You can’t win if you don’t play!” I wonder,
Don’t people know that all this is just cunning marketing? Why
does anyone want to put down money they are –more likely than
not- going to lose? People gamble to experience hope, and that rush of
hope is addictive. I don’t have a problem with money generated
from gambling when the spender is able to feel at peace with letting
the money go. But gambling is unethical when it is exploitative.
Exploitation is defined as, “a persistent social relationship in
which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for the
benefit of others. In the field of ethics, it is the treatment of human
beings as mere means to an end, or as mere objects. In different terms,
exploitation refers to the use of people as a resource, with little or
no consideration of their well-being.” [see answers . com] One of
the most striking things I noticed at Mohegan Sun was that well over
half the people there, whether working or gambling, were Asian. A
little research reveals that Mohegan Sun and casinos like it
deliberately target low-income Asian immigrants. Just last month,
journalist Donny Tran published his article, “Casinos in the U.S.
Winning Big by betting on Asians,” in viet q. news. He wrote:
“The biggest casino in the world based on gambling floor space,
Foxwoods estimates that at least one-third of its 40,000 customers per
day are Asian….. The number of Asians in the United States
increased by 17% between 2000 and 2004, the fastest growth of any
ethnic group during that period, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
And few industries have catered to the Asian boom with as much cultural
competency as the 75 billion dollar U.S. gaming industry. Every day,
Foxwoods and nearby Mohegan Sun combined send more than 100 buses to
predominantly Asian neighborhoods in Boston and New York. The number of
buses doubles on Chinese New Year, and on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Mohegan Sun says Asian spending makes up a fifth of its business and
has increased 12% during the first half of this year alone….
Zheng Yuhua emigrated from southern China to New York City eight years
ago. She works six days a week, 11 hours a day, preparing take-out
orders at a restaurant in Chinatown. On her day off, she takes one of
the Foxwoods buses. ‘All of our friends come once or twice a
week,’ Zheng said, ‘Life in America is hard. Our English
isn’t good. Even if we have time off, there’s nowhere else
to go. We don’t have cars.’… Dr. Tim Fong,
co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program began studying
gambling addiction among Asian-Americans in 2005, and called it a
‘subtle epidemic. It’s out there, it’s insidious,
slowly damaging families.’ Fong said.”
And gambling is also
unethical when it holds out false hope– when the odds are
ridiculously lousy and the organization is deceptive about how lousy
those odds are, as I have found to be the case with state-run
lotteries. The National Gambling Impact Study Commission’s
research on lotteries states: “State lotteries have the worst
odds of any common form of gambling (a chance of approximately 1 in
12-14 million for most existing lotto games)….. Lottery proceeds
used for a specific program, such as public education, in fact simply
allow the legislature to reduce by the same amount the appropriations
it would otherwise have had to allot for that purpose from the general
fund….. The most basic fact driving all lottery operations is
the relentless pressure for revenue….. Most of the recent growth
has come from the introduction of new forms of wagering, such as
machine keno and video lottery devices… These machines are
commonly licensed to bars, convenience stores, etc., thus dramatically
increasing their presence in public life. They also have prompted
concerns that these new games exacerbate existing negative impacts of
the lottery, such as the targeting of poorer individuals, increased
opportunities for problem gamblers, and presenting the latter with far
more addictive games….. Is running a lottery at cross-purposes
with the larger public interest? …..Speaking to a meeting of his
fellow lottery directors, Jeff Perlee, Director of the New York State
Lottery, warned that, ‘…our advertising is often
relentless in its frequency, and lottery critics and even supporters
are left wondering what public purpose is served when a state’s
primary message to its constituents is a frequent and enticing appeal
to the gambling instinct. The answer is none. No legitimate public
purpose justifies the excesses to which some lottery advertising has
resorted.’ Giving force to this concern is the widespread
conception that the lottery is a regressive tax because it draws a
disproportionate amount of its revenue from lower-income groups…
the image of the state promoting a highly regressive scheme among its
poorest citizens by playing on their unrealistic hopes..… In the
words of one lottery director, ‘Gambling, including playing the
lottery, is potentially addictive and can be dangerous and destructive
for some people, some of the time.’ The evolution of state
lotteries is a classic case of public policy being made piece-meal and
incrementally, with little or no general overview. Authority –and
thus pressure on the lottery officials-- is divided between the
legislative and executive branches and further fragmented within each,
with the result that the general public welfare is taken into
consideration only intermittently, if at all. Few, if any, states have
a coherent ‘gambling policy’ or even a lottery
policy….. It is often the case that public officials inherit
policies and a dependency on revenues that they can do little or
nothing about….. This raises the troubling question of whether
the state itself has become addicted to lottery revenues. In the words
of Harvard University professor Michael Sandel, ‘No politician,
however troubled by the lottery’s harmful effects, would dare
raise taxes or cut spending sufficiently to offset the revenues a
lottery brings in. With states hooked on the money, they have no choice
but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the more
vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work,
sacrifice, and moral responsibility that sustains democratic
life.’”
Is there an
alternative for individuals and states addicted to gambling revenue
that results in long-term fiscal health, rather than unending monetary
loss and debt? Richard Leone and Bernard Wasow of The Century
Foundation have proposed such an alternative:
“Instead of
funneling bettors’ losses into general revenues, government could
use the money to support people in their old age. A Savings Lottery
plan would guarantee that whenever someone bought a lottery ticket,
some of the outlay would go into a savings account in the
player’s name. So even perennial losers would always be partial
winners. Over time, lottery machines would be replaced or modified so
that every lottery ticket sale would be matched, if the buyer elected,
to his or her Social Security number, to ensure proper crediting.
Access to the lottery savings funds would be limited until the owner
turned 65, at which time the owner would be issued either an annuity or
lump-sum payment equal in value to the accumulation in the account. If
the owner died before age 65, the money would go to heirs.
…Granted, the savings lottery is neither the most elegant nor
the most efficient way to build up a nest egg… but it is a good
deal better than grabbing as much money as possible from poor and
poorly-educated citizens determined to squander their incomes on
million-to-one shots. It is offered here… as a starting point
for an effort to put government back where it belongs: as regulator,
not promoter, of legalized gambling, and as educator, not exploiter, of
the citizenry.”
As a religious leader,
should I object to gambling? Yes, when it deceptively holds out false
hope and when it is exploitative. And as people of faith, we must speak
out against an industry which has distended way out of control, and is
causing real harm. Contacting the candidates before the Massachusetts
Gubernatorial primary this Tuesday and the mid-term elections on
November 7th would be an opportune
time to do so. Most people, including those with the most power and
privilege, have not examined the gross expansion of the gambling
industry in our nation, and so they have not noticed its real harm to
the people who are most vulnerable, including the poor, racial
minorities, children, and teenagers. We must speak up and say that
we’ve noticed. Religious leaders are charged to, above all,
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The gambling
industry is filling the pockets of people who are already extremely
comfortably-off. Resources, ours and our neighbors’, should
instead go directly to activities which build community, cultivate the
arts, care for our natural resources, promote literacy and higher
education, and develop anti-oppression and multi-cultural
appreciation-- that the Massachusetts the next generations inherit will
be a true commonwealth, not impoverished with vices, but enriched by
virtues. As Paul implored the religious leaders in Philippians [chapter
4]:
“Whatsoever
things are true,
Whatsoever things are
honorable,
Whatsoever things are
just,
Whatsoever things are
pure,
Whatsoever things are
lovely,
Whatsoever things are
of good report—
If there be any
virtue, if there be any praise,
Think on these
things.”
Let it be and, Amen.