Teach... your children well

An Open Letter to Mike Pilla, Middleboro School Committee Vice Chair:

Dear Mike,

I read, with some interest, your editorial in this week’s Gazette. The one in which you seem to be attempting to justify the school committee’s decision to come out in support of a local casino.

The same one in which you state “there is a faction of anti-casino people who have concluded that if one supports the casino, then they will have taught that gambling is acceptable and/or that gambling is a valid means to success.”

The very one in which you insist that if “one supports the sale of alcohol, it does not follow that one would necessarily support drunkenness.”

Mike, if you’re actually trying to make an analogy between patronizing a liquor store and Middleboro’s affirmation of an agreement to become dependent on the future revenue of a Multi-Million dollar addict factory a mile from the Peirce Playground, you need to go back and repeat the third grade.

You continue, in your editorial, to point to the recent casino battle as offering a series of valuable learning experiences for our children, such as, “they have learned that towns have budgets and that some towns do not have enough money to provide all the services people want or need” and that “People post signs ‘for’ an ‘against’” and that “sometimes people do not respect those with differing opinions.” You make a long list, nothing on which I would disagree with.

Except that it’s incomplete. Somehow Mike, you’ve neglected to mention the other lessons the decision to host a casino in Middleboro has taught our young people.

They’ve learned that you should fight appropriate revenue streams, while giving the green light to inappropriate ones.

(…Southpointe and Xerox vs. Slot Machines)

They’ve learned that rushing into a serious agreement without an appropriate amount of forethought, research or discussion is OK.

(Let’s hope all our kids give more time to choosing their future spouses than the town did to signing on with it’s newest business partner.)

That fear and intimidation can really work when you need it.

(Clearly, threats from Glenn Marshall, clandestine sign stealers, verbal harassment at town meeting, and propaganda in the form of free orange t-shirts suggest that intellect has officially taken a backseat to bullying in the old ‘boro.)

That financial dependency is preferable to fiscal responsibility.

(May your daughters all find rich husbands!)

But perhaps these lessons don’t go far enough. You yourself suggest that we mustn't isolate our children from potential dangers. So why not take it a step further and drive the kids down to Foxwoods and leave them locked in the car for a few hours while you feed the slots. Buy them a pack of cigarettes and get them started early on the lessons of addiction. And why not tell them they’re on their own for college since you blew the college fund down at Mohegan this weekend - and watch the expression on their faces. Take them on a field trip over to the Nemasket Cemetery, where I can direct you to the grave markers of a few recent gambling-related suicides which occurred even without a casino down the street. Heaven forbid we should isolate our kids from those potential dangers.

But let’s not forget the most important lesson our children will take away from this sad chapter in Middleboro’s long history, that most noble of messages your committee took no small part in sending with your endorsement of the agreement - that everything and everyone has a price.

Good job, Mike.

Yours Truly,
Gladys Kravitz