Recently, Campus Philly, a group that aims to retain college students who have graduated from Philadelphia area schools, showed that there is a potential increase in the number of students who remain in the Philadelphia area -- a trend that is beneficial to the city's effort to cultivate a reputation for having bright, young people.
However, the city's recent attempts to bring in slot machine parlors are a step in the opposite direction.
Instead of fostering an image of a city with promising new talent, varied cultural activities and a reduction in crime, Philadelphia instead is contemplating putting a blight on the Delaware River.
These slot machine parlors, an initiative not only to try and increase revenue for the city but to modernize Philadelphia as well, will instead attract the same atmosphere prevalent in another city a few miles away on the Jersey shore. One need only look at the way Atlantic City regressed from a vacation spot to a place to blow one's retirement savings.
Modernizing the city and increasing revenues are laudable goals. But casinos and slots are not the way to attain them. If the City of Philadelphia truly wishes to take its spot among the finer cities of the country and shed its reputation for corruption and crime, it should not continue to encourage such seedy operations but instead invest itself in avenues that will truly show progress.
The city has such an important history. Let's not tarnish its future.
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