The Citizen, 2012-09-27, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2012. PAGE 5.
Gambling is a tax on people
who can’t do math.
– Anon
Iam driving through the pre-dawn murk of
an early summer morning en route to
Pearson International Airport, a couple of
hours away. I’m on a gravel road, no traffic in
sight save an obese raccoon that waddles
grumpily off the shoulder and into the brush as
I pass.
No other signs of life, but a glow looms up
over the trees on my left. I get past the trees
and…
What…
The hell…
Is that?
A neon fortress is what it is, huge and totally
alien here in the Ontario hinterland. A sign in
front tells me I’m passing Casino Rama and
that Dolly Parton will be performing next
week. My wristwatch tells me it is 6:15 in the
morning. And my eyes tell me that the Casino
Rama parking lot is nearly full.
Full? At dawn?
You betchum, Lone Ranger. Casino Rama is
the largest First Nations casino in Canada. It is
run by and for the Chippewas of Rama First
Nation and it is a right little gold mine. The
facility boasts a hotel, a 5,000 seat
entertainment centre, 10 restaurants and two
lounges, but mostly it boasts 2,500 glittering
slot machines and 110 gaming tables, all
dedicated to separating gullible patrons from
their money.
There’s no shortage of them either. Casino
Rama perches on the geographical forehead of
the Greater Toronto Area, close to flush urban
centres like Barrie, Lindsay and Midland.
Literally millions of potential customers live
within a bus ride of Casino Rama. Not
surprisingly, the owners run free shuttle buses
pretty much around the clock.
It’s a pattern that’s repeating itself around
North America. The Mdewakanton Sioux of
northern Minnesota used to be an
impoverished and hopeless band of American
Indian survivors existing on government
handouts. Now, they have Mystic Lake
Casino, proceeds from which have financed a
community and fitness centre, a hotel and an
RV park.
The tribe has done so well it’s been able to
hand out more than half a billion dollars in
loans and outright grants to other tribes for
economic development. They even made
enough from the casino to donate $15 million
to the University of Minnesota for
scholarships and a new stadium.
The Sioux have also set aside money to
return to their roots, restoring wetlands to
promote waterfowl, fish and wild rice
plantings. They’ve put in organic gardens and
planted fruit trees. And they’ve started an
apiary to harvest honey.
But their most lucrative honey-
making beehive is the glitzy Mystic Lake
Casino which attracts thousands of
customers (overwhelmingly white) each week
to lay their money down and watch it
disappear.
It’s quite a turnaround. Just a few hundred
years ago First Nations people of North
America lived in all the abundance they could
handle. Then came the white man and, by
judicious application of whiskey, guns,
syphilis and lawyers, changed all that.
In 1626 some European sharpie showered
a band of East Coast Indians with 60 Dutch
guilders worth of trinkets, beads and
hatchets. The Indians had no concept of
land ownership, but they accepted the gifts.
Later, they learned they’d just sold Manhattan
Island.
Chief Dan George put it more succinctly:
“At first we had the land and the white man
had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and the
white man has the land.”
The great irony is, First Nations people
through agencies like Mystic Lake Casino and
Casino Rama, are slowly buying their land
back.
And they’re using the white man’s money to
do it.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
You wanna bet? Plenty of us do
During a recent interview to promote
Canada’s Olympic parade through the
streets of Toronto on Sept. 21, kayaker
Adam van Koeverden spoke about his success
at the 2012 Olympic games in London.
While van Koeverden came away with a
silver medal from London – adding to his
silver from Beijing in 2008 and his gold and
bronze medals from Athens in 2004 – when
pressed, van Koeverden said his career’s
greatest triumph was winning the Lou Marsh
Trophy in 2004 as Canada’s top athlete for the
year.
The award, van Koeverden said, was the
highlight of his career because of one name
etched in its marble: Terry Fox.
As an athlete, van Koeverden knows the
names of the national heroes who are
immortalized on that award. People like
Marilyn Bell, Maurice Richard, Bobby Orr,
Phil Esposito, Fergie Jenkins, Bobby Clarke,
Sandy Hawley (twice), Guy Lafleur, Rick
Hansen, Ben Johnson (twice), Kurt Browning,
Mark Tewksbury, Mario Lemieux, Donovan
Bailey, Jacques Villeneuve (twice), Mike Weir,
Steve Nash, Sidney Crosby and Joey Votto, to
name a few, have all hoisted the trophy. The
Great One Wayne Gretzky has won the award
four times.
But it is Terry Fox that causes van Koeverden
to well up with pride.
Last week hundreds of runners of all ages
took to the streets, fields and trails to take part
in the annual Terry Fox Run at various sites
throughout Huron County, raising thousands of
dollars for cancer research.
I have written about Terry in this space
before. He has always been a huge source of
inspiration for me and someone Canadians can
truly hold up as an example of what it means to
be a Canadian.
Being diagnosed with cancer in 1977, Terry
was 18 years old and instead of feeling sorry
for himself, he devised a larger-than-life plan
that would eventually become the Marathon of
Hope.
His intention was to raise one dollar for
every one of Canada’s 24 million citizens after
becoming disappointed at the lack of funding
cancer research was receiving during the late
1970s and early 1980s.
The run itself raised over $1.7 million, a
subsequent telethon – after Terry was forced to
abandon the run for health reasons – raised
$10.5 million and as donations continued
through the winter, donations surpassed $23
million. And now over 30 years later the Terry
Fox Run, an event that has taken place all over
the world, has raised over $500 million for
cancer research.
For me, it’s easy to see why van Koeverden
would be so honoured to have his name
associated with Fox’s. Fox was a man who
only had 22 years on this planet and who died
a year before I was even born, but his
dedication and work ethic is forever engraved
on this nation.
As the Terry Fox Run rolls around every
year, I find it easy to open my wallet for the
cause and I find myself thinking about Terry
and all he did (and continues to do decades
after his death) for so many people.
I grow irritated with people who complain
about the smallest details of their everyday
lives and who shrivel up when their day
doesn’t go as they had planned, refusing to go
any further. When I listen to those people
drone on about how hard life is I think of what
learning about Terry in public school taught me
and how difficult his brief life was and I try to
have some perspective.
A national treasure
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
The world I grew up in is pretty much
non-existant these days and it scares me
to look around and see how quickly
humanity not only changes, but how quickly
they consider these changes mundane.
There are plenty of reports about how kids
today are the first generation that will do
things drastically different than their
predecessors.
Sure, in my youth, there were things that
weren’t around when my parents or their
parents were young, but the practices of
childhood more or less remained the same.
We had Nerf guns instead of using gun-
shaped sticks when we played cops and
robbers or space aliens or whatever, we had
weird frisbees released every other year and
the action figures, well they came with a lot
more than just a kung-fu grip or pull-string in
the back but we still had to use our
imagination.
When I was a teen, things were changing
and doing so rather drastically.
Video games had gone, in a short period
before my birth and in the 10 years that
followed, from one button and one joystick to
two joysticks, a directional pad and anywhere
from six to eight buttons to master. Computer
games were beginning to become connected to
other players as the norm instead of the
exception. The world of the internet and
networked e-communication was well on its
way to being everyday. I, not wanting to be left
behind, jumped in with both feet, but I didn’t
stop doing other things in life as well.
I still played euchre at lunch and during
spares with my classmates, I played ultimate
frisbee when I had the time, in the summer I
refereed soccer and in the winter I played
hockey.
We all talked about television shows;
whether it was what we watched in reruns the
night before or being excited about upcoming
shows, it was a common theme for people.
Sorry, I guess I’m getting a bit nostalgic
here, but it’s important to realize that, while I
grew up during some of the biggest advents of
the digital age and while I certainly tried to
take to them like a fish to water, I never felt the
world I had come from was wrong or lacking.
Technology has created a world where laws
fall behind technologies, morals fall further
behind the laws and eventually we’re stuck in
somewhere more gray than black or white.
Whether it’s downloading music (illegally),
streaming television shows without the
commercials that pay their budgeting costs or
pirating software, children now-a-days are
brought into the grays of moral dubiousness
long before I ever had to deal with it. When I
was young, the worst thing I ever did was
make a mix-tape and even then I felt tainted
whenever I listened to it.
Beyond that dubiousness technology has
created, it’s led to unbounded greed.
In my time as a self-professed gamer I have
only once attended a midnight launch for a
high-profile title. Afterwards, I was so
exhausted that I didn’t even play the game.
However, as I’m sure many people are aware,
thousands of people lined up at Apple stores
and Apple retailers across the world recently to
get their hands on the holy grail of personal
computing; the iPhone 5. Most don’t need it,
they just want to own the best of the best.
I owned an iPhone at one point. It was a
nifty piece of technology. One day I realized
that it had become less a phone to me and
more something to define myself. I divested
myself of it shortly after. Now, my phone is
whichever one I like that costs less than $50
when my old phone stops working.
Now, though, people are trading in their
iPhone as soon as new ones are released (about
a year in between each iteration) not because
of the bigger, brighter screens or better
batteries but because to not have it would be
passé. It would leave them as technological
have-nots and they simply can’t have that.
Some days I sit down and consider the world
that we live in and look at my future plans of a
family and I become genuinely disturbed by
the reality of what I’m looking at.
When I was young I got a Nintendo for my
fifth birthday. I cherished that thing. When the
new Super Nintendo came out, I still had my
Nintendo. When the next generation came out,
I still sat down and played my Nintendo. I still
have that Nintendo, actually, sitting in a box,
waiting for the day that it becomes an antique
or the day I pass it on to someone else.
That kind of reality doesn’t seem to be the
norm anymore though. Most children have a
cell phone, most of them have their own
computers, most of them have a television and
many of them have the newest video game
systems in their rooms.
I don’t think that, as a parent, that would be
my priority for my children and I would be
afraid that the reality I grew up in, which
would be one I would want my progeny to
share, would be one that would induce ridicule
from other children for my own now.
I probably wouldn’t give them a cell phone
until they could drive. I wouldn’t give them
their own computer until... well I didn’t have
my own until I was in Grade 10 and even then,
that was the only computer in the house I was
living in.
Call me old fashioned for thinking that, 10,
15 and 20 years ago, my parents knew what
they were doing when they gave me something
between what I needed and what I wanted to
make sure I appreciated what I had.
So when I see people lining up for hours, or
even days, to get a video game or a phone, I
have to wonder what has gone wrong with the
world.
I see a world void of imagination, morals or
logical thinking. I see a world where each
generation becomes greedier, more morally
dubious and more reliant on owning things to
boost their status.
I hope I’m wrong in what I see, but it
certainly makes me question my future plans.
A future of greed and false idols
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den