Gambling is the worse habit!

Most of us are bound to become parents one day. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we ensure our children never take up the gambling habit.

To be very sure my children never get addicted to gambling, they were never given the opportunity to gamble even on special occasions such as Chinese New Year. To me and my wife, it is an unnecessary activity.Of course, as the parents, to show a good example, neither of us ever gamble, buying lottery tickets only once in a blue moon.

Even buying lottery numbers, hoping to strike it rich can lead a person astray. In an earlier posting I have told about a relative, a Chinese Physician, who was already very rich with lots of money from the many clients who seek treatment from him. He had this idea of compiling all the numbers that appeared in the results of each lottery draw throughout the whole of ten years. With that he pointed out to me that certain numbers seem to appear regularly. And with that he planned on betting on that number to appear in a few months' time, with him placing a higher and higher amount on it so that when it did appear he would be a sure winner. Sad to say, he lost too much for him to ever return the sum he owed. One night his whole family disappeared into the night never to return.

Was it greed? Or was it the mind that thought it had a fool-proof idea of becoming rich the easy way? Was he too confidence in his mental capability? Whatever it is, he lost too much at a time when his career was going full swing.

When it comes to gambling, in order not to give the habit the chance to develop, we must ensure our children do not mix with the wrong company. Mixing with the wrong company can take our children to disaster. If it is a group of drug addicts, the child could be doing drugs soon, if it is loiters, it would be loss of education and advancement opportunities for the child; and if it is a group of gamblers, no doubt the child would turn to gambling.

Where would gambling lead a person? Well, newspapers very often carry stories of gamblers who borrow money to support their habit. The latest was a young man, one working in a bank, who developed an addiction to gambling. So you see, it does not matter what a person's job is, how intelligent he can be, he is just as susceptible to the thrill of gambling. Gambling caused the young man to lose all control of his senses, enough to have him get into a debt of RM70,000. Unable to return the loan he got from loan sharks, he did the miserable deed of exposing his own family to harm by providing those loan sharks a photocopy of his own mother's identity card so that they could go after her.

As a result of that action the loan sharks demanded money from the poor mother and when she could not return the money, the amount escalating with each day, the family was threatened with harm, paint splashed on the car and part of the house. Eventually they even tried to burn the house! Their lives were certainly at stake, all because of a gambling son.

As for the gambling, he became a fugitive from those loan sharks. To do that he had to leave a good job and disappear God knows where. Look at all the problems and the bleak future for this gambler. Like that relative of mine, this gambler would also have to disappear for good.

So, how much effort are we willing to put in to prevent such a destructive habit from ever surfacing? If you look at the above young man, he has lost everything that his parents had helped him to establish. As for the parents, they have lost a son, at least for the next foreseeable future.

“My son gave one of these loan sharks a photocopy of my identity card and asked them to recover the money from me,” said Lim’s mother Chong Shue Koon, 60.
She said her son had left her and her husband Lim Loi, 58, a note saying that he owed loan sharks RM170,000, and that he was leaving.
Lim Loi said his son, who works as a bank clerk in Kuala Lumpur, had developed an addiction to gambling last year.