A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE ON LOTTERIES AND GAMBLING

What's Happening Elsewhere - Mississippi
Added on 03-28-2001

Welcome to Potemkin Village, Miss.

By William Perkins Jr. Editor Mississippi Baptist Record March 8, 2001

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin was a brilliant Russian Army commander and statesman who lived in the eighteenth century. Described as loyal and magnanimous, he was also licentious and extravagant. Potemkin is probably best remembered as the person credited with bringing German-born Catherine the Great to the Russian throne in a cloud of deep intrigue, and then becoming her trusted advisor and morganatic lover for several years.

Dispatched by Catherine to colonize Ukraine, however, he grossly miscalculated the money and manpower necessary to get the job done and was on the brink of disaster when Catherine sent word that she wished to see for herself how the colonization was proceeding. Potemkin set about the desperate task of covering up his Ukrainian debacle, concealing his monumental administrative blunders and erecting entire artificial villages to convince Catherine that his program was proceeding as planned.

It worked. As the mighty queen passed by Potemkin's villages in her carriage, she was duly impressed with the hollow fakeries that had been constructed to deceive her. Thus, 'Potemkin village' came to denote any pretentious facade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition, reports Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Mississippi has its own Potemkin village ¯ a shabby, undesirable condition that has been glossed over with a "pretentious facade" that would make the originator of the concept a proud man. It's called the gambling/political complex.

In the early 1990s, gamblers and politicians began constructing their Potemkin village in a desperate attempt to conceal the true picture behind "gaming," as they euphemistically renamed one of the most addictive behaviors known to man.
The gamblers and politicians told us to forget the broken families, and to think about the thousands of jobs that would be created by legalized gambling.
They didn't tell us that most of those jobs would be sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays, while the high-paying management jobs went to people imported from the parent casinos in Las Vegas.
The gamblers and politicians told us to overlook the shivering children locked in cars populating casino parking plots while their parents lost every cent inside the glittering gambling palaces, and to think of the tax money that would pour into Mississippi schools.
They didn't tell us that, nearly a decade after legalization, school systems from one end of the state to the other would be struggling to avoid four-day weeks, underpaid teachers would still be going without raises, and superintendents would be counting pennies to put gas in school buses.
The gamblers and politicians promised us the moon, and then dumped us in a ditch when they got what they wanted.

Now comes yet another slick new advertising scheme, utilizing billboards that are popping up across Mississippi, to convince us that gambling enriches all of us to the tune of $360 million dollars each year. Just don't look behind the billboards, where the true human cost of legalized gambling is found

Are Mississippians gullible enough to believe this latest public relations gimmick  (and that's all it is) from the gambling/political complex? Time will tell, as always, but one thing is certain. Whenever we pass one of the new billboards, we should give an admiring tip of our hats to General Potemkin. His namesake is alive and well in Mississippi.

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