Like many other towns in Maine, Bangor has a road which leads past pristine historic buildings, past centuries of forgotten memories, out to the modern, gaudily-painted chain stores on the edge of town, buildings with no higher meaning or purpose than an appeal to self-indulgence and consumerism. Such roads are like clear streams with which each passing mile grow dark with pollution. With churches on every hill and rows of historic houses, Bangor seems all the more tragically stricken.
Families with deep roots in Bangor are now wondering if their city will be lost forever. For the first time, the elderly are afraid to walk the streets at night for fear of being mugged. The crime rate is increasing, just as the crime rates in other towns is falling.
More telling is Bangor's rejection of authentic Maine values. The ideals of sobriety, thrift, and industry are steadily buckling under the weight of over-consumption and instant gratification. Businesses with an authentic Maine feel grow fewer and fewer, as consumers flock to establishments with an ersatz feel for the outlandish and the exotic. Those who possess a true New England heart continue to dwindle in number; and if a rural Mainer, a fisherman or farmer, or a country parson is shown in the media, he is the subject of a parody, a relic of a bygone age.
This catastrophic spiritual collapse has a symbol, and it is the massive gambling facility on Main Street which appropriately bears the name of a faraway place - Hollywood.
What role Hollywood Slots plays in Bangor's downfall - increased crime, higher unemployment, a loss of retail sales - is difficult to state with precision. It is an exaggeration to say that gambling by itself has the power to ruin an entire city. Rather, it is more useful to think of Hollywood Slots as paralleling the decline of Bangor, a logical culmination for a society whose highest spiritual aspiration is the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar.
Thus the muggings on Main Street are the crude counterpart of the more sophisticated methods used at Hollywood Slots. Both are sure signs that our society no longer has the will to protect itself from those who prey on the weak. The consequence of society's apathy is a growing toll in lives.
Hollywood Slots has already claimed the life of Aaron Walsh, a decorated Army veteran and problem gambler who used a shotgun to kill himself in Baxter State Park. Not long ago, a Maine woman was found dead in a Las Vegas casino hotel, murdered by her problem gambler boyfriend who then leapt to his death from the top of Hoover Dam. Recently, a middle-aged teacher, Gail Rasmussen, robbed a bank in Concord, New Hampshire to support her gambling addiction.
Surely the saddest story of all was that of the problem gambler at the Isle of Capri casino, who in broad daylight, in view of other casino patrons, calmly removed her shoes, set down her purse, and threw herself over the railing into the water of the moat surrounding the casino.
This then is the polluted stream, the path leading from a land founded on the Yankee ideals of honor, obedience to God's laws, and love of one's neighbor - to a increasingly corrupt and chaotic society - a society in which far too many people value gold more than the lifeblood of their fellow citizens.
Lacking any unifying set of values, or commonly held moral beliefs, our society is easy prey for men with one burning ambition - the lust for gold, more and more gold, gold heaped up in great shining piles until it blinds the eyes, gold obtained at any price, by any method.
That is, until the real men of Maine stand up and call on state government to finally put an end to it, and send the predators back home to Las Vegas where they belong.
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