Gambling... Our Most Dangerous Social Affliction

Talk of the Month (1)

Never has summer ripened but that a great social affliction has ripened with it — one that, whenever I have turned it over in my mind and examined its causes and its consequences, has appeared to me grave in the extreme. I mean the affliction of gambling.

I do not know why my soul is stirred up in the summer season, indignant and in revolt against gambling and against gamblers. Perhaps behind this secret lie deep memories in my soul, folded around painful wounds that return and renew themselves with every summer as the years pass; and so I draw my weapon and declare merciless war upon this affliction.

Some objector may say: there is no need for this harsh fury, since the government itself has put a limit to this affliction by banning games of chance in the hotels of the Mountain, so that the green table has lost its glamour, and the magic wheel has lost its gaiety and its luster!! Our situation today is better than it was yesterday, when the spinning wheels were the favorite amusement in the Mountain, and when the pivot of every hotel, great and small, was the gaming room... at its center a green table with the people around it, their eyes riveted on a magic wheel that turns and dazzles, and does not come to rest before it begins its turning anew.

Yes, those scenes no longer show themselves today in the remote, scandalous openness they had yesterday; but there are dens for the addicted, scattered here and there, sheltering under the authority of this man or that, which their people frequent regularly and in semi-secrecy, slipping in among their fetid walls to kill their days and their nights...

I shall not now attempt to take up the authority that protects these secret dens, nor am I concerned with that class of people who find no way to build up their finances except by way of gambling... No, neither this class nor that is the object of my concern today; what truly concerns me is the corruption that has befallen our society and led to this painful reality in our social life...

This reality may be the cruelest of the calamities in our social life, and the most dangerous of them for the Lebanese community, striking it in its health and threatening the national immunity within it, which before long will collapse altogether...

Yes, my talk will center on this wretched society that has fallen prey to the disease of gambling; I shall define its condition precisely, and take up in detail the position of the Lebanese woman with regard to this corrupting, devilish pleasure.

The psychologists analyze gambling as an "Outlet," an escape from the emptiness in life... This emptiness draws the gambler to the green table, where he makes his first throw, which soon becomes a grievous habit that captures him and grips him by the throat; his will weakens until it vanishes, and he becomes an abject slave seeking easy gain — and how rarely does luck bend to his wishes, and how often does it resist him and strip him of his money, his honor, and all the noble values in a man! His temper turns savage, his health deteriorates from late nights and the frequenting of night clubs, and in consequence his energy and his love of work dwindle, and laziness and torpor take possession of him.

And the one who pays the price most dearly is the family itself; nothing like gambling can threaten the family's very existence, violate its sanctity, and rob it of its happiness and its contentment.

If the dangers of gambling were confined to the man alone, the matter would be light, and the woman would set about treating the situation and putting things back in their place, with the wisdom, deliberation, and knowledge she possesses. But the calamity has gone beyond the man — alas — and the woman now has a hand and a foot in it... For a portion of our women has strayed from the straight road of its mothers and grandmothers and chosen for itself another road, which it calls "modern," wrapped about in cowardice and servility... The worst thing in gambling — its snare — is this phenomenon that we witness sweeping over woman herself like a wave of fire and brimstone. The germs of the grave disease that threatens the Lebanese community have seeped into the body of womanhood in a lamentable fashion that calls for shame... And this phenomenon concerns us, the women of this country, because it touches directly

(1) Broadcast from the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station

on our private lives, and on the lives of our husbands, and on the life of the nation of which we count ourselves the favored and loftiest part... And so I say boldly: the woman who gambles is working to squander every great value in her life and in the life of her nation; she is digging under the edifice so that the edifice may collapse upon those within it, leaving not one stone upon another... While she wins liras by the hundreds, even by the thousands, she is losing dignity and honor and exposing herself to suspicions — and how plentiful they are in a country among whose traditions it is that a woman guard her dignity and her honor...

A country in which the woman bends over the gambling tables, night and day — her eyes straying among the wheels and the spotted cards, to return at the end of the night broken, drowned in anxieties, and find a child's bed with a maid or a nursemaid bending over it — is a country marching toward ruin...

And what a betrayal of hopes, the day the woman in Lebanon becomes an element of corruption and of corrupting!!

*

And what will history say, on the day history records against the Lebanese woman this social collapse? And what will the woman herself say when her society confronts her with this bitter reality? The reality, as I have insisted, is very bitter and very grave, and the matter may appall us when we know that a large portion of the body of womanhood in Lebanon is going wholly astray in gambling — a portion whose energies could be invested in works of charity, benevolence, and love. And it is emptiness — emptiness within the self, and emptiness of love, and emptiness of life — that drives the woman to kill her hours at the green tables... If the woman were conscious of her true nature and of her true position in her family, her society, and her homeland, she could fill her days and her months, and go about doing good — good in abundance...

... And if the woman realized that the money she squanders here and there, on what avails nothing and profits nothing, could find its way to an orphan's heart, to the eye of one wronged, to a sick man's complaint,

then the woman could set a stone in the beautiful, clean edifice she is preparing in this homeland... And then, too, the woman could stand up to the man and speak her word and demand her rights — and she will have no right if she has no duties... It is the woman's right to know her duties first; if she knows them, and performs them to perfection, the dams and the boundaries that the man sets in her path will collapse out of her way.

Woman's mission has been, and remains, to build, not to destroy. It is therefore her duty, beyond boycotting the gambling houses completely, to work positively and consciously to suppress the disease and prevent its spread; and nothing is more effective toward that end than consolidating the foundations of sound upbringing in the rising generation, and laying firm bases for high ideals. Nothing can restrain a person from sinking low and becoming a gambler like moral firmness — which in our homes and in our society has grown unsteady and feeble. Our first duty, as wives and as mothers, is to build up this moral firmness and to nourish it, not in our homes alone, but among our neighbors and in the social circles we frequent and that fall within our sphere of influence, however small that influence may be...

And let us be vigilant eyes over our adolescent children of both sexes, giving them positive direction as to how to burn their vitality and energy — and nothing is better than the arts of physical exercise — and watching over the many temptations of the age, from cheap reading matter to inflaming motion pictures, etc.

Woman's responsibility in the face of this social problem is grave: the women's committees, and the women's pens, and all the abundant moral forces women possess are called to a campaign against gambling and its people... And would that the government enacted a bill that sent the gambler to his death — then we would be among the fiercest champions of that law, and I would bring all the women to vote for it and pass it... — this, of course, once we come to have votes!!