Wanna Bet?

Sometimes my son asks me questions for which I have no answer. Not like when he used to ask why the sky was blue. It turned out that I happened to have an explanation for that. As it turns out, I told my inquisitive five-year-old, that the water droplets and dust particles in the air are bigger than the wavelength of blue light, which is what gets reflected back, causing that to be the color that we see down here on earth. I know, it was a lot for that kindergarten brain to absorb, but if he didn't want to know the truth, he never should have asked.
Just recently, my now sixteen-year-old asked me why gambling was illegal. I thought about all the wavelengths of light that might help answer this quandary. I thought about all the things I know about gambling, and how it's only legal in Nevada. And Atlantic City. And on Indian reservations. And in church basements where the Bingo games are located. And when the government sells us lottery tickets. But other than that, I came away a little confounded.
Maybe it was more of a moral issue. It's only really bad people who you find making bets. Like the little old ladies playing Bingo.Or those members of the Wintun Nation who opened the Cache Creek Casino back in 2002 on the site of an old Bingo parlor. So maybe the loophole had something to do with getting the corresponding letters and numbers to match up on your card. And maybe that's why the lottery is legal, since it borrows so heavily from that five in a row notion. Two in a row would be just dumb luck, but five shows some sort of divine intervention. God must really want those people who can achieve this feat to have more money, hence that whole church connection.
Which may be why there are so many wedding chapels in Las Vegas. This legitimizes all those otherwise nefarious goings-on. But there still wasn't a solid line to be drawn about what was legal and what was not. Or why. The stock market is legal, or at least it gives the impression of being so, and it seems an awful lot like gambling.
Maybe it had to do with the way the profits were dispersed. Our state lottery is supposed to eventually pay for schools and parks and so forth, when it's not making new millionaires. That church Bingo game is supposed to buy new pews or hymnals. The Cache Creek Casino profits are supposed to be used to make us all feel better about that whole Native American genocide thing. Illegal gambling profits go to a guy named Guido. That's not right. So it's illegal.
I hope I've cleared this up for someone.