CASINOS ARE PRETTY BUT NOT NEXT TO MY HOME

From October 20, 2007 ON AIR JUDGE WYLD SHOW - Radio Talk

Excerpt from show prep notes. On air content may have been more or less. Not journalistic or debate notes.

CASINOs Are Pretty but Don't Belong at Home

I like the pretty lights. I have money to spend that I can lose without altering my life style. Mostly the entrances to the Casinos are clean and non-threatening. The slot machines are the dumbest activity a person can engage in.

It’s more glamorous with all the pretty lights on the machines than sitting at home picking your toenails. But certainly you don’t lose too much money picking your toenails.

The blackjack tables are generally friendly places with helpful dealers. If you can keep track of the pink chip as a 50cent piece and know that it’s not a 50 dollar chip then the rest is pretty easy to figure out.

The food outside the casino gambling area is pretty good even in the buffet restaurant. But you see, No one really thinks a casino is good for their community. We all know that if the community leaders really cared about a community, they’d be more creative than handing the city economics over to huge business bosses.

Let’s face it, if strip joints brought in millions for schools and roads, we wouldn’t think that economic growth would be worth the quality of life cost. We want our communities clean.

We want our communities to feel like a community of people smiling, visiting, interacting with nature and each other, pursuing interests and talents and building up this country. Not a community of clones following marketing hype toward waste, shallowness, weakness, and empty poverty.

You know… it is fun now and then to leave your good, clean, healthy, and happy community to look at the pretty lights, eat a different food, talk to different people. we all know how to smile politely and be amused for a few hours of something different.

But we aren’t sick, we aren’t talentless, we aren’t clones. we are grandma and grandpa, mother and father, carrying on the quality of life in place of our ancestors, our great grandma and great grandpa, our father and mother…We owe it to our children to be productive and self-generating of goodness and healthy attitudes.

So we see the casino and say “fine”. Let them have their extra money if it makes it. We will make it through life richer and happier... here at home. Where we belong. And casinos don’t belong.