The odds are stacked

There is an old joke about two guys hiking suddenly faced with a charging grizzly bear coming after them from a good ways off. One of them immediately sits down and starts putting on his running shoes. The other says, “Why do that? You can’t outrun a grizzly.” The punch line is, “I don’t need to outrun the grizzly, I just need to outrun you.” Expand that sad joke to a huge pack of wolves and a slightly larger pack of people. All of the people will run as hard as they can, but very few will come out unscathed.

That is the casino industry. Those wolves are mathematically guaranteed to partially to totally devour most of their customers all of the time. They just have to be good at convincing all of them that each will be one of the few “winners,” and hope they don’t notice the vast majority of “losers.” The fact that gambling is a recognized addiction helps them a lot and they give away lots of entertainment, food, flashing lights, excitement, and alcohol for nominal costs which are also addictive for many, so they are home-free if they can get their industry “legalized.” So I am voting, again, against letting the wolves loose in Arkansas any more than they already are in Hot Springs and West Memphis. Since there seems no end to the out-of-state gambling corporations who will try to get a monopoly for themselves in Arkansas, I might be for legalizing a casino or two, near our borders, and requiring gambling corporations to compete with design/ build/manage proposals that get renegotiated every 10 years.

Maybe we can get that up for a vote. Let the wolves in a little into the state just enough to get a fair share of the proceeds. Maybe that will put an end to this poorly disguised constitutional monopoly “license to steal” campaign occurring every other election year and get the state significant money, not chump change. DARREL ODOM Little Rock