More Is More in Vegas, Baby

The Girl and I came to Las Vegas, Nevada, with her mother and brother. Tonight is our last night here after being here since Friday. That's five nights of Las Vegas. That's five nights of excesses, gambling, drinking, shows, music, lights, camera, action... Five nights I won't soon forget not so much because of what I did, but because of what I did not do.

The best thing of how I feel about Vegas is that The Girl feels much like I do. We both think that the excesses of this town could be better put to work. There is not enough recycling done. There is too much alcohol being served too liberally. Too many people are spending too much money, and many of them can't even cover their next rent bill. Too much! Too much! Too much! We don't hate Vegas, but we don't particularly like it, either.

You see, my idea of fun has never (and hopefully will never) HAVE TO include drinking. Call me crazy, but the idea of numbing my senses in order to have fun doesn't sound like fun. Sure, I'll drink in social situations. I'll drink a mojito or two (as I am doing in the picture to the left). Nothing strong. No need. Fun to me is all about laughing, forgetting my problems WITHOUT adding on to them. I love to feel alive.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for most humans. Humans love to be addicted to something. (I'll confess... I love cake.) And the thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of entrepreneurs in Las Vegas know this. They use our own human psychology to take our money. And they have become quite adept at it. I got a taste of this the day we got here.

I sat down at a slot machine and put in three dollars. Before I knew it, I had made $53. That's a $50 credit. I took out my winnings and handed the money to The Girl. (She's better at administering it than I am.) The question lingered in my head the rest of the day: Could I have won more? I felt the need to go back and gamble again. So I did. Yet my experience (or lack thereof) with gambling prevented me from gambling it all away. In the end, I ended about $10 ahead. The rest was either gambled or eaten away. They have the best buffets in Las Vegas, and the Mexican food is not bad at all.

Take this experience of mine and multiply it a few times, then multiply that times millions. That is how Las Vegas makes money even though there is so much being wasted. Give a little, knowing that the customer will come back for more, then take them for all they've got. It is the perfect business model, and no one seems to care. No one worries that there are entire city blocks being torn down and rebuilt at great cost. No one seems to worry that entire family budgets are blown on games of chance.

For The Girl and I, the worst thing is that Las Vegas represents one extreme of a continuum whose other end encompasses places like Somalia, Darfur, and Bangladesh. As much as we waste here, the losses are nothing compared to the loss of human life and treasure in war-torn regions of our world. But Vegas doesn't care. People walk aimlessly from one attraction to the next, oblivious (consciously or not) of the horrors that other humans who are worth just as much as they are wake up to every morning... The nightmare that it is to be poor, hungry, and infested with parasites.

I don't mean to be a "buzz-kill", but you can only take on so much of Las Vegas. People like The Girl and I, who really mean it when we say we want to save the world... People like me can only have so much fun in Las Vegas. We gladly paid eight dollars each to see a car collection. I gladly paid $80 for both of us to see a variety show. But I could never spend excess money so much so that I could not pay the bills, or feed my kids. I can't see myself spending money to the extent that I enebriate myself to the point I don't know what's going on. I can't. I just can't.