As I sit here at my desk, with my Dr. Pepper and butter cookies, composing this column, I am debating whether or not to take the Fighting Illini and the six points in their next game, but if our federal government gets their way, I will never have a chance to make that decision again.

It appears that congress has taken an interest in the world of legal sports gambling. They want to pass a law that would make betting on college athletics a crime. I used the word legal because they failed to mention the millions of illegal bets that are placed each year (and that’s just in our area alone).

Congress also believes that by passing this law they will curb the dishonesty of today’s college athlete (obviously they have heard of the Florida college programs). What the hell is this supposed to mean? Are they saying that to play college sports you need to be dishonest? Are they insinuating that all college athletes cannot resist the temptation of being bribed into throwing a game?

I am not quite sure what they hope to accomplish by passing such a law. Believe it or not, there are plenty of places that a person can go to place an illegal bet on college sports (no really, there are). Yet congress does nothing about said places (I know, maybe they just don’t know about these places yet).

Better yet, why don’t they pass a law that puts an end to all forms of gambling and not just one’s pertaining to sports betting. Yes I said that, why don’t they do away with all forms of gambling.

Stop and think about it. Take a look around yourself and look at all the sources of gambling that are there. We’ve got the state lottery (you stand a better chance of being struck by lightening then you have of winning the lottery).

I know, it helps us fund our school systems (maybe we can get the money to buy the swing set). There’s at least one riverboat within a seventy-mile radius of us. You also have the horses racing in the suburbs and the greyhounds running in Wisconsin.

Better yet, if that is not enough for you, you can hop a jet to Vegas for around three hundred dollars for three fun filled nights, just don’t forget the college fund. Even better still, if you are afraid to fly, all you have to do is download a casino off of the Internet, and walla, gambling made easy.

Oh yea, did I mention the tickets, gambling machines, and various other forms of gambling in our local recreational establishments.

Well by now, provided you have made it this far, you may be asking yourself how does he know all this? With the exception of the Internet casinos and Vegas, I have experienced it all first hand. I grew up with a father that did these things and I learned how to do them way to well. Unfortunately, I also never learned how do win at them either.

I found out the hard way what it was like to waste countless hours and thousands of dollars and to walk away with nothing. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I would quit when I wanted to. I thought I could get that one big win. I thought wrong. I became a person that I never thought I would become.

The only bright side to the whole thing is that I got out of it (my family still intact) before I fell through the cracks. I could have ended up a statistic, just another addict that lost it all. Yes, I said addict. Gambling is an addiction, a sickness that causes way too many tornadoes in a land promised to be filled with pots of gold and rainbows.

My point? My point is that I once believed that it was okay for these things to be around. I always used to say jokingly that this area was built on that sort of thing. I guess I found out the hard way that it was not so funny after all. I guess I just held the wrong belief.

I believe that what Congress needs to look into is the overall effect of gambling in general, to put an end to it all. You can’t stop a gushing chest wound with a band-aid, and that’s all they would be trying to do by doing away with college sports betting.

By the way, I was just kidding about the six points thing at the beginning of the column; it was actually seven points (just kidding).