This guy is good. Here's a glimpse of life in Vegas.

What happens here, stays here

by CHIP MOSHER

Grandmothersfrom Cleveland, plied with alcohol, lose their life savings at slotmachines. Casino owners, like pack rats, hoard the money, refusing topay their fair share in taxes to support the city's infrastructure ofhumanity. This, the infectious greed of a gambling culture. And whathappens here stays here.

Impoverished cancer patients deniedlife-saving treatments at a community hospital. A hundred citizensallegedly infected with hepatitis during routine exams bypenny-pinching doctors. An uninsured, sick, expectant mother notallowed proper emergency room protocol, and her unborn baby dies.Thousands of homeless children on the streets, turning to drugs andturning tricks to turn to drugs while looking for love in all the wrongfaces of pimps and pushers. Sex is the entry-level currency of agambling culture. And somewhere a casino mogul reportedly is paying arecord price, $33 million, for a Rembrandt painting for his elitist artcollection. What happens here stays here.

Dead bodieseverywhere. Like a war zone. Murders. Suicides. Tourists on the NevadaHealth Plan -- beer in one hand, cigarette butt in mouth while playinga slot machine -- their corpses ending up on casino floors from heartattacks. Unlucky babies tossed into Dumpsters. Gang violence. Caraccidents at every major intersection. Driving and talking on a cellphone is equivalent to driving while intoxicated, but in Vegas, 24-hourdrunks infest the roads while talking on cell phones. Trips to grocerystores become Death Race 2010. Blood flows more than rain in stormdrains. Vegas is not civilization, but rather an ultra-violent pretenseof civilization; a systematic scourging of mankind's better instincts;a modern-day Inquisition of the human heart, where heretics aresilenced, and all citizens must bow down to suckle on the theology ofthe slot machine teat. Human life has no value. As what happens herestays here.

Many pet owners have lost their paychecks betting onfootball and can no longer afford pet food. Thousands of dogs and cats,dumped in the desert, end up euthanized at animal shelters. Neglectedchildren at home wonder what happened to the family puppy, Muffy. Agambling culture ruthlessly strip-mines the human soul until nothing isleft. But what happens here stays here.

Careers of superstarshave gotten flushed down toilets of trouble because ethical entropy hasreduced the Las Vegas Strip from America's playground into adilapidated whorehouse spreading the insidious HAV (human avaricevirus). There is something rotten with the state of this gamblingculture. In the sewers underneath the city, the <snip> of ourshort-sightedness stays here.

To promote an appearance ofStepford-like civility, bright shiny new schools sit across streetsfrom the bright shiny religious temples that grow rich in this gamingMecca. But behind the impressive architectural facades of schools,terror lurks. Students and teachers pass through the education systemlike prodded cattle on their way to slaughterhouses. Many disappearovernight, in despair, never heard from again. The bottom line to thecasinos' greed is a school district based upon education in ruralMississippi in the 1930s. With the lowest per-pupil funding in thenation, Vegas's children are second-class citizens. Many students havebeen "resegregated," by color and economic class, into ghetto-izedschools. One former district superintendent proudly proclaimed:"Niggers come in all colors." And powerful casino owners, through theirpuppets in the state Legislature and on the local school board, havepromoted that superintendent's philosophy -- by treating teachers assuch, in both pay and the slave master tactics of fear. Publiceducation has no place in a gambling culture. True learning, in aSocratic sense, might shed too much light on the darkness beneath theslot machine theology. Yeah, gaming moguls very much want whateverhappens here to stay here. And somewhere Rembrandt must be weeping.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher.

http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2010/02/04/opinion/socrates_in_sodom/iq_34093036.txt