I went Downtown today for the purposes of people-watching and relaxation. I could have taken a drive to Goldfield or St. George or someplace, but I'm on the road next weekend so I wasn't going to do that today. Sometimes I enjoy Downtown and other times I don't. I guess I didn't want to get "apartment fever" today, so I made the drive.
I have been there often enough to where I recognize the regular weirdos and street performers. I've seen several of the same panhandlers over and over.......one notable one being a lady who had stage 4 cancer when I saw her there last year, and who now has stage 3 cancer according to her sign that she updated three months ago. I can pick out the hucksters and scam artists who are hawking time-shares. King Solomon wrote some several centuries ago that "there is nothing new under the sun" and that would certainly apply to the Fremont Street Experience.
Yet today, I saw something that wasn't there before. There were three young men standing at a table, holding signs that were asking for donations to fight child sex-trafficking in Las Vegas. While I was sipping a Dos Equis at the outside bar in front of the Golden Nugget, I observed several tourists donating money to these men. No doubt that the tourists felt good about doing "something" to fight this problem, although as a regular reader of the Las Vegas Review-Journal I haven't seen any articles about the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department cracking down on the illegal sex trade.....until two days ago. I know those young man weren't out there last Saturday because I met a good friend of mine at that very same bar. And as I'm watching these tourists hand over money to these young men, I couldn't help but ask myself a question: how do I know that these guys are for real?
My experience along Fremont Street is that no one who is trying to get money away from you is your friend. No one is using honest means to get that money from you. This would of course, exclude those kiosks selling souvenirs, but all up and down that corridor are people holding cardboard signs claiming to be victims of circumstance of one kind or another. I have seen them there for eight months running now. And now I'm seeing what purports to be a legitimate operation. But again, the question remains, how do I know that these guys are for real?
I'm going to make one thing clear here. No one who is in their right mind is in favor of child trafficking. Those who traffic and those who use the children are very sick people who belong chained together in a correctional facility and using sledgehammers to convert boulders into talcum powder with no hope of parole.
However...........in case you haven't heard me say this, or read this previously, I'm going to repeat an observation that I frequently make about Las Vegas:
Half this town is out to cheat the other half of town!
And odds are, no pun intended, the percentage of people who are not visitors to Fremont Street who are out to cheat you is significantly higher than 50%. I'd venture to say that it's somewhere up around 85%. It's very possible that these guys I saw for the first time are part of that 15%, but how do I know that?
They are soliciting donations in a public area. Although solicitations of this kind in and of itself are legal, you don't know what happens to that money once you part with it. There is no way of verifying that your donations are going to the cause you want to help. They could be passing out literature and not accepting donations, but what they're doing here is asking for donations and then giving you the literature. The literature itself may or may not be 100% true, and I'm not even sure that is possible to quantify the dollar amount or number of people involved in child trafficking in the first place. Those who do it don't file reports to the government or collect sales tax. Those who are victims are intimidated into remaining victims. And those sick people who use the victims don't go around telling their friends and neighbors what they really like to do on their time off.
I really hate to be skeptical about these guys.
Sadly I am, and more so, considering where I am currently living.
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