A Wage of Sin
May 2nd, 2007I have come to a deduction over the Macau May Day riot that you probably won’t read anywhere else. It was a Wage of Sin.
Poorer, ignored, regular residents of the enclave, excluded from the huge amounts of money being grasped out of the gambling explosion, lost their tempers as they marched, provoked by poorly paid, under trained policemen. It is no coincidence that the spark to their ire was a gathering of great goblins of greed, the men who ignore them, in attendance on their political front man , Macau chief executive Edmund Ho who was mourning his elder brother.
These greedy men not only become rich by milking one of man’s crazier compulsions, they make fortunes from property prices which render the cost of living unbearable and import cheap and illegal labour from the Mainland to avoid having to pay the residents much if anything at all.
Like prostitution, gambling can be tolerable out of necessity but not condonable. Once upon a time it was widely accepted as a sin, “an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law†according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It has not come along very far since then, particularly amongst the Chinese with whom it remains a peculiarly aggressive obsession.
That Macau’s income should expand grossly and almost entirely from gambling is a grotesque distortion. This is not upward growth. It is the ballooning of a massive goiter on the body, one wholly out of proportion which pulls it over into painful postures. We saw one of those on Monday afternoon. The fear and hate you could smell through the TV screen. It was a Wage of Sin. I will be interested to watch future pay days.
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