In addition to my regular Green Felt Journal column this week, I’ve got a “Latest Thought” for your perusal in Vegas Seven:
There hasn’t been much written about locals casinos on the scholarly front, so Nedelec, a geographer, shared a conclusion from a chapter in 1999’s The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip edited by David Littlejohn, Oxford University Press: “Neighborhood casinos have become the senior centers of choice for thousands of local elderly people. … [Gambling] provides them with … a degree of entertainment and excitement that to them seems worth every quarter they lose, infinitely preferable to the county’s senior centers or staying at home watching TV.”
It was a harsh reminder that, yes, this is the crux of the prevailing scholarly literature about locals casinos: warehouses for drone-like elderly Las Vegans who—even if they insist they don’t gamble more than they can afford to lose and actually enjoy themselves—are getting a bad bargain.
That sent me thinking about the reality: There are tons of public recreation opportunities here. Aren’t there? While Real Las Vegas implies that our county rec centers are comparable to the county lockup, I think we have a far broader range of options than any casino I’ve been to—everything from capoeria classes (a Brazilian art that melds martial arts with dancing) at the Cambridge center to watercolor workshops at Desert Breeze. There’s a cost for most of these, but it’s rarely prohibitive, even to those on fixed incomes.
That’s pretty much how the idea started–trying to prove that maybe the social scientists aren’t seeing the whole picture, and that we’re not all really a bunch of drones who have nothing to do.