This is an opinion column.

That slippery slope your mama talked about? It’s right downtown.

In Birmingham.

Just look up. You’ll see it. Garish and insidious and gross.

You can’t miss it. It’s the first thing you see when you drive downtown – except for the interstate construction, of course. It’s the prime sign atop the skyline, the cheap costume jewel on the city’s golden crown.

And proof that mama was right all along.

This is not a slippery slope. It’s an oily hill, a greasy grade to greed.

This is what happens when we are not vigilant, people. This is what happens when we begin to accept the unacceptable, when we allow weeds to grow in the community garden or wicked thoughts to fester in our brains.

Once you let ‘em in, you can never keep them out.

So one day we have a charming sign, scrolling public service messages and the news of the day in an iconic fashion above a 17-story building. The next we turn our skyline into a billboard for a poor-man’s casino in somebody else’s two-bit town.

Man. I thought it was the worst thing in the world when the scrolling sign atop the 2 North 20th Street Building was covered up five years ago with a billboard that proclaimed – as if true – that Pepsi was “a Southern original.”

I thought it couldn’t get worse than that, that an Alexander Shunnarah billboard would be infinitely preferable because, well, as least it represents who we are. But I was wrong. Man, was I wrong. Because it could get worse and did get worse and doesn’t much look like it will get better.

Atop the building now – the tower previously known as the Bank for Savings building – is a two-sided ad for the Wind Creek Casino and Hotel, complete with a super classy picture of a giddy, greedy woman with a handful of cash.

“Where Birmingham goes to win big,” it says.

Making us all look like losers. What next, a tattoo for title loans across Vulcan’s behind?

It’s like the evil timeline from “Back to the Future won out,” and Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Paradise Casino and Hotel is splashed across the city skyline.

Marty: "I don't get it, Doc. I mean, how can all this be happening? It's like we're in Hell or something."

Doc: "No, it's Birmingham, although I can't imagine Hell being much worse."

Birmingham tried to fight the slide down this Vaseline Hill Valley. The city’s Planning, Engineering and Permitting department sent multiple cease and desist letters to the owners of the sign – Pennsylvania-based 84 Outdoor – when they first covered the scrolling sign with a billboard years ago.

The city shook its fist at those dodgers of decency and said changes must be approved in advance by the city’s Design Review Committee. But nothing much happened. It was a toothless, feeble fight, and the city wound up looking impotent. And cheap.

Eventually the Pepsi sign gave way to a UAB sign, which was better, but still violated the city codes. But the door was opened, and Wind Creek blew on through. And now Birminghamians don’t even seem to notice that the most prominent sign on the city skyline advertises a bingo casino in another city.

Sure, it’s a blight on the city and a sign o’ the times. But it’s also a cautionary tale, just like mama said.

When you are willing to accept less than you deserve, well, you deserve what you get.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.