(By John Blackeye) A few months ago I woke up early to run an errand. It was just eight o'clock on a cold day like many others in a gloomy winter. Maybe I had to pay for something that had a deadline and so I come near a tobacconist who has the doors closed. I go inside to do what I had to do, but in front of me a lady is giving ten euros to the owner, asking him to play a series of numbers on a certain wheel. Looking around me, still dazed on a day that is struggling to take off, I notice that three elderly ladies are looking at a monitor placed at the top, on a corner of the tobacconist's shop while another asks the shopkeeper if he has time to make an episode for the next game that would start a few minutes later. I believe that the owner did not have time to wake up that the four women were already waiting for him.
If I had to start with a joke I would have said to the owner: "But did these ladies sleep here? ".
But there was no point in joking and I didn't because a drama was taking place before my eyes.
Staying in line for my shift I saw that the women, of ten euro tickets, pulled out many, looking for that millionaire win that could change their lives.
In fact, I'm not even sure that those people are aware of a millionaire win and, perhaps, they wouldn't even be able to change their lives. In fact, those people have fallen into the abyss of gambling and it seems that from there, it is really difficult to get out of it.
I leave behind the ladies who do not even notice my presence and I go out of the bookshop to go to breakfast in a bar nearby.
There is no crowd in the Bar. I order my cappuccino but I am distracted by a systematic noise that comes from behind a wooden booth where a man is pressing his index finger on a key of a slot machine with force and at a steady pace. With his gaze fixed, at each stroke, the man tries to understand if on the monitor he is able to align three equal symbols, in this case three fruits. But between bananas, strawberries, apples and pears, that alignment never occurs and that man, absent from the world, continues to press on that infernal machine by inserting from time to time the tokens in the slot that now no longer even looks because he knows by heart.
I leave the bar and think of the old ladies in the reception. I think back to how they were dressed. Modest in all but their faces. In fact, they had signs of devastation on their faces. Stare, eyes off, smile of pain. Devastated by an alienation that led them to spend money with which they could have spent the week shopping.
More than a million Italians who, in the morning, instead of thinking about how to organize the day, are looking for a slot or a reception to satisfy the psychological need that keeps them prisoners in a world that is physically and mentally impoverishing them.
My thoughts then moved to their families. How many fathers, mothers, children, husbands, wives have stuck in the tunnel of gambling and can no longer get out of it, often throwing their loved ones on the pavement.
We know that on the winnings the State, soberly and discreetly, takes a percentage of us and, therefore, it is difficult in a period of crisis like this, in which money is being collected to the right and left to meet the emergency needs of the whole country, that we can do without those revenues.
But as I walk away in my pseudo-normalcy, I think back to those family dramas.
I don't know the sector very well, nor do I know the terms of the disease and its impact on Italian society, I only saw some old women and a man gambling at eight in the morning.
I read that there are more than one million ludopacites in Italy who make more than one hundred billion euros play. Huge numbers, how huge is the problem of those who, at home, have to deal with a family member who tells you to go out to buy cigarettes but in reality you are playing to the last cent in some corner of a bar, hidden by a wooden partition.
I believe that as in the case of drug addiction, it is essential to detach the patient from the vice and this should be done following a path of readaptation that seems to affect only one in a thousand.
The alternative is to change the world and the twist is right here: we won't believe it, but that's exactly what happened. The world has stopped, with its rhythms, its paradigms and its certainties. A pandemic has paved all our certainties.
The world, in less than a month, is no longer what it was before.
Suddenly you can no longer gamble, you can not make bets or bets of any kind and this, in my opinion, is the windfall descent from heaven.
Those who are close to these people should not miss the opportunity. This is the time to finally disconnect players from their nightmare. Fate or the Good Lord have offered you this chance, don't throw it away, try to detoxify those around you now. An occasion like this may never return to the face of the earth. Carpe diem and get everyone out of hell.