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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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It’s the size of those numbers on posters of dazzling colours—12, 15, 20, 23 . . . Like seductive sirens, I find them irresistible; even if they referred to peanuts they would get my attention.
The fact that they refer to millions of dollars makes my heart leap momentarily—all of those millions promised to me—if I buy a ticket.
So I do. On tele, I see my numbers come up. I fall on the floor ecstatic and the celebrations begin. The cheque arrives, I pay off my house and plastic debt. I give some to family and then . . . I wake up.
Gambling has never been a practice let alone a problem with me. In a competition organised in my workplace, I accidentally won the footy tips and received $40. By “accidentally,” I mean I paid no attention to the performance of the teams; I just chose at random. I quit while ahead. A relative similarly won first prize in a televised lottery and enthusiastically promised that my home mortgage would be taken of. I got a cheque for $1000 and the occasional loan of a luxury European car. It was a large tad short of settlement.
The numbers on those posters are something else, however. In 1993, a record jackpot of $110 million was won in a US lottery. Envy is a sin, so I can only think about how much joy and sadness, how much triumph and misery that kind of instant financial “reward” produced.
Wealth is ungrudgingly granted to those who have worked for it and who by doing so train themselves into the problems of managing it. But what must instant wealth do? The evidence is that the opening chapters of fulfilled dreams are accompanied by epilogues that conclude in epitaphs.
Australians spent nearly $A14 billion on organised gambling in the year 2000-01, an increase of 26 per cent on three years earlier. Four of that $A14 billion went to government, nine was paid in winnings and more than one billion represented profit to the thousand-plus official gambling businesses. During the 1990s, Australian spending on gambling rose by more than 40 per cent. Between 1982 and 1992, gambling, as a percentage of Australian household expenditure, doubled.
Every state has a casino, and gaming or poker machines have flourished everywhere except in WA.
In 2001, Australians threw nearly $A9 billion down the throats of those glitzy machines. Some 6000 of them are scattered around the country. In Victoria, the scattering is less random than elsewhere: they are concentrated, without apparent conscience, in low socioeconomic areas where working-class Australians are already spending proportionately more on gambling.
Annual losses amount to about $A900 for every Victorian and New South Welshman, and about $A500 for West Australians and Tasmanians. Some 2.3 per cent of Australians (about 330,000) are classified as problem gamblers and lost a yearly average of some $A12,000; one-in- 10 report that they’d contemplated suicide as a means to solving their problem.
As a state-regulated practice, organised gambling goes back at least 2000 years to ancient India, where the duties of a “gambling superintendent” are recorded in an ancient text. But taking risks and playing with chance is probably as old as human consciousness. ( What are the odds, that if I eat the fruit of that forbidden tree, God will really follow through on what He promised? ) n The human propensity to gamble is a flaw; it says something about our desire to win when the odds are stacked against us.
Getting the numbers right is a game of chance where we like to imagine destiny may, on one occasion, be robbed of its indifference to the human condition. To my condition. A dream that wealth may give one’s life a quality of transcendence.
In the US, tickets for one lotto sell at 10,000 a minute. It seems we all want the dream to come true, to be free of debt and live a life of fantasy.
In Christianity, faith is a ticket to such a life. It makes instant eternal winners of people. Nevertheless, even faith winners must learn to cope with their newfound riches. It’s a difficult adjustment, sometimes; but it’s worth it. This really is a dream come true.
Extract from Signs of the Times, November 2002.
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