EDITORIAL — Another cautionary tale

A post that has now gone viral in social media tells the story of a 35-year-old public school teacher in Echague, Isabela, who hanged himself earlier last month.

The reason? He was over ?200,000 in debt because of his online gambling habit.

His adoptive father said the victim had shown promise since he was young and was an achiever up until he became a well-liked teacher. They didn’t really know about his gambling habit until after he killed himself.

Threats from his creditors to pay up or else they will reveal his debts publicly allegedly drove him to despair.

In previous editorials we wrote about people whose lives have been ruined by online gambling addiction. A recent editorial talked about two people who snatched from others just so they can support their online gambling habit, as well as one family man who robbed a butane store so he could have money to bring home to his wife after he gambled it all away online.

There was also that 20-year-old who tried to burn his mother’s house down in Barangay Tisa, Cebu City, after she wouldn’t give him money to gamble.

It would seem that this is another cautionary tale.

Again, what someone does for entertainment or pastime is one’s own business. This, of course, includes online gambling. It also cannot be denied that for those who have been lucky, small or even big fortunes can be made overnight.

But those who bet don’t always win, do they?

And for those people who always want to bet bigger and bigger to recoup previous losses, the debts can pile up before one even realizes it.

And while there are those who know when they have to stop gambling, there are also those who either don’t know or cannot. Don’t know they have to stop gambling because they don’t realize how big they now owe, or cannot stop gambling because they have become hopelessly addicted to it.

And these are usually the ones who realize too late that it has ruined their lives. And they can be anyone from career criminals, to well-liked public teachers, to ordinary family men.

The lesson remains the same: Know when to stop.