photo by max greenberg
Do you know the difference between Hell and Harmless? Most people have a clear-cut sense of the difference in at least one place: Casinos. Hell is having poorly defined boundaries in a place designed to take your money. You can go in, play some games, maybe even win a few, boost your confidence, and try for more. You can come really close to winning big. Close enough that you’ll come back at it sure that you’re on the trail for success. For many people, this is an intoxicating recipe that can lead to bad choices. And for the addictive personality that is driven by an unchecked need, this setting can lead to disaster. Hell. Each step of the way may seem like an okay choice, a risk, but a calculated risk (that wasn’t really calculated) that never seems quite catastrophic.
Harmless isn’t actually that hard. I have friends who’ll go to a casino and consider it an evening’s entertainment. They’re clear that it’s entertainment and not really expect to make money off of it. Still, knowing the powerful pull of the win, they’ve got a very simple guideline. They’ve got what I call Casino Rules. You set a clear limit. After that limit you stop. You can stay and play all night if you want to, but you walk in the door with a set amount of cash, and that’s your limit. If you have wins, and are making money, you can play all night. Or you can play small and stretch it out. Or you can quit while ahead. But if you use up what you walked in with, then you’ve hit the limit. And you stop. No borrowing from friends, run to the bank, or visit to the ATM. It’s a simple rule, and it’s effective.
Casino Rules can apply to any potentially risky behavior that may have gradual steps of loss. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, gradual steps make it difficult to see the big picture and how far you’ve come from your starting point, or when you’ve gone over the edge into danger. This is a common problem with addictions of all sorts. It’s also a problem with economic risk-taking of various kinds from investing to entrepreneurial get-rich-quick schemes. The power of graduated steps to keep us in the present and lose sight of the whole path can be very useful when pursuing a positive goal that’s hard to achieve. For example, dieters often do well to just focus on losing 5-10 pounds at a time, since the task of losing 40 would be too overwhelming. But if the path is one of damage and hurt, then the same principle is dangerous. Limits to the losses you’ll suffer must be clearly set at the beginning of the road – before you’re too far along the path and only seeing each gradual step in front of you. Thus the Casino Rules.
Casino players and stock market investors all have clear guidelines that they use for setting these limits. So why don’t we, as a nation of petroleum consumers, have a similar rule? Michigan’s had enough trouble the past few years. But now we’ve been hit with the worst oil spill in our history with approximately 1 million gallons released into the Kalamazoo River, on a pipeline that had been cited for poor maintenance earlier this year. So far, the oil hasn’t hit Lake Michigan, and EPA predicts that it won’t, but the very thought is quite chilling. The Great Lakes are the largest liquid repository of freshwater on the planet.
We cannot just take each accident at a time. We must use Casino Rules. We must set a limit with a fresh perspective. When is it enough to be beyond reasonable risk? If we address each crisis by itself, we may never make a solid long-term decision. If we’d set such a limit in 2009, the gulf spill would likely have surpassed it already. Instead, we focus on the crisis and the clean-up. Then do the same in West Michigan. And do the same off the coast of California. And do the same off the coast of Massachusetts. And in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And in Florida, Texas and more. The list is already longer than you think, just in 2010.
We need (as a state or a region or a nation or a world) to set a limit. Where’s the threshold? How much oil will spill before we collectively agree to change our reliance on it? We must set the limit, and we must set it now before we end up in an addicts anonymous chair, introducing ourselves and telling the story of how we wrecked our lives and betrayed our children to a silent, empty room.
