Why do we suffer? Who or what causes it? These age-old questions of suffering are addressed in the Book of Job and in a recent article from the New York Times “Las Vegas Faces Its Deepest Slide Since the 1940s” written by Adam Nagourney.
The main character of the Book of Job is a remarkable man: “blameless and upright” (Damrosch, p.126). Job is blessed with a large family and many possessions: “there [are] born to him seven sons and three daughters”, and “he [has] seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she-asses, and very many servants” (Damrosch, p.126). All this wealth makes Job the “greatest of all the people of the east” (Damrosch, p.126). On the other hand, in the New York Times article Las Vegas is described as the entertainment center of the world, famous for the number of casinos, shopping malls, and fine restaurants.
In the Book of Job Satan offers God to test Job’s faith and devotion. In response, God puts Job in Satan’s power, with the exception of Job himself. In one day Job loses his kids and all material possessions through various calamities. Distressed and grieving, Jobs still continues to worship God; he does not “charge God with wrong” (Damrosch, p.127). However, Satan does not consider this suffering sufficient; so, he strikes Job with painful boils hoping that it will make Job curse the God’s name. Despite the pain and his wife’s advise to “curse God, and die” (Damrosch, p.127) Job stays strong. Similarly, “the nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert […] in the 1940s” (Nagourney, 2010). The two most important economic pillars of the city, gambling revenues and the construction industry, are shaken by the recession. In addition, “officials […] are watching another potentially disruptive storm on the horizon: legislation in Congress that would legalize Internet gambling” (Nagourney, 2010) that can draw people away from Las Vegas. And as the Job’s wife suggests dying, many big hotels announce laying off workers and closing casinos for renovation.
At one point, three Job’s friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) conclude that the innocent don’t suffer; therefore they challenge Job to show them where he has sinned. In the same way, many politicians and public figures try to find reasons for the decay of Las Vegas. David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas says: “It’s been in bad shape before, but not this bad” (Nagourney, 2010). Many claim that “Nevada is paying a price for an exuberant and often speculative run of commercial and residential construction that has left the market glutted. As a result, the confidence that the return of tourists alone would spur the city to rebound automatically after this recession — the way it did after, say, the recessions of 1982 and 1992 — is absent” (Nagourney, 2010).
Even though no one is able to analyze painful experiences of human existence and find a direst answer about the reasons for sufferings, there is still a hope for a positive outcome in both works. Job’s latter days are blessed more than his beginning: seven sons and three beautiful daughters are born to him, and all his possessions are doubled. However, in the case of Las Vegas the outcome is not that obvious and promising. Even though the mayor believes that “as soon as [people] feel secure in their financial position, […] Las Vegas will come back stronger than ever” (Nagourney, 2010), others feel that “there needs to be some real, thoughtful, deliberate effort to rebuild an economy [in Las Vegas]. It isn’t going to happen by itself.” (Nagourney, 2010).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/us/03vegas.html?scp=1&sq=las%20vegas%20faces&st=cse
