The part that gets to me is the comment by a family member:
Strogen’s family is outraged by AT&T’s actions. Strogen’s granddaughter, Barb Gordon said “It’s taking advantage of the elderly. People our age wouldn’t even consider leasing a telephone.” Gordon also expressed her anger and pointed out the obvious that “If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?”
“Taking advantage of the elderly”? How long has it been since everyone who’s paid any attention at all (and has more than two active brain cells) has known that leasing rotary phones from Ma bell is unnecesasary? Sure, the woman’s in her 80s now, but she was only in her 50s or 60s when such information became common knowledge. Anyone stupid enough to pay a $10/month rental/lease fee for a piece of trowaway technology really ought to be paying that money as a fine for stupidity.
But no, our society wants to put bumper guards on life, now… and that’s making us ever more stupid and incompetent. In our economy of abundance and our society of cocooned ease, we are breeding whole generations of incompetent, lazy nincompoops and whimps (or over-reacting hyper jackasses). As a small example, the other day a young nephew of mine asked about some DOS commands so he could play around on an old computer his family had aquired. Almost stumped me. Windows (and Linux, for that matter) are so graphically-oriented, so easy, that I rarely use DOS commands any more, rarely write batch files, rarely even see the command line.
Enstupiating ease. That’s a critical danger to our society. That and cocooning, bumper-guarding children throughout childhood and adolescence to the extent that they never grow up to be really competent adults but sheeple who always need someone else to take care of them, instruct them in how to do things. Incompetent at learning or doing nearly anything on their own.
Filled with an always present undercurrent of fear.
Take a “discussion” I’m having elsewhere with a gal who prides herself on being a swimming inbstructor (for nine whole years! woo-hoo!). Her claim to expertise? She is the ONLY swimming instructor she knows or has even heard of who can teach someone the breast stroke in half an hour!
Gime a break! When I was eight, I saw someone doing a breast stroke in the public pool we frequented. I thought it was cool, so I did it too. (And yeh, if my lifesaving and WSI instructors years later are to be believed, I apparently did it right.) A few minutes later, I “taught” my six-year-old brother the breaststroke. How? “Hey! look what I can do!” “I can do that too!” “Show me.” So he did. Simply by copying me.
Big stinking deal.
But no, not today. Today, apparently it takes instruction by a professional for today’s incompetent whimpy kids to learn an idiot-proof breast stroke. And it takes (apparently) 30 whole minutes to do so. Gee, people really are getting stupider by the minute. Growing up, I never met anyone (who already knew how to keep their head in the water) who couldn’t pick up the breast strooke in under 5 minutes, “instructed” or not.
And so it goes. “Education professionals” (filling positions that formerly would have been filled by teachers) are talking (again) about how training wheel teaching methods (oh! That’s another experience! I never knew there were such things as “training wheels” as a kid. Just got put on a bike and pushed off… ) can cripple students’ intellectual development.
Yeh, it’s all talk.
*sigh*
I think I learned the breast stroke when my Dad threw me into the Withlacoochee River at age 8, or perhaps every stroke there is because thar’s gators and moccasins in them thar waters. LOL
That’s some motivation, Diane! I, too, learned to swim by being dumped in deep water… swimming pool at my grandparents’ neighbor’s place. I darn near drowned before I got the hang of it. Fortunately, that was in the days when freedom was still (barely, but still) more important than safety. I’m sure the neighbor kids woulda pulled me out before it was too late, but what a feeling of power I gained by surviving on my own, despite the choking, gasping and struggling.
Of course, I coulda just given up and drowned (and been rescued) and become a crybaby whimp, afraid of the water. Fortuitously (from sheer luck?), the neighborhood kids at the poolgave me room to succeed.
I ended up being burned to a crisp that day cos once I got that feeling of power over the water, I did NOT want to come out.
🙂
Of course, I could have spent days and days taking “swimming lessons” and been bored outa my skull by folks who had no idea that the best way to learn a physical activity is to first just DO it. Bad habits get engrained? Maybe. But I have had to erradicate plenty of bad habits from wrong-headed (stupid) baseball coaching, shooting instruction and the like. Some physical success in an activity, THEN coaching (by someone competent–very rare critters indeed) much better for most folks, but in our bumper guard, cradle-to-grave society, ain’t no such thang no more. Better to create sub-competent, dependent babies-for-life.