(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Kitchen Table Kibitzing~ Note to self: Insert Content Here, Save Draft and Publish, Dumbass [1] ['View Profile'] Date: 2026-04-18 The transition of DKos to WordPress has once again reminded me that I am not particularly technologically savvy, to say the least. In this respect I am of course hardly alone. In fact, one of the seldom-remarked consequences of the digital revolution occurring in this country over the past quarter century was the virtual abandonment of an entire generation, that of my parents, to the brutish, mandatory imposition of technology upon their lives. I remember when my father was first advised by his financial broker that he was required to provide an email address in order to access his retirement account. Of course he had no email address, since he’d never operated a computer and did not own a smartphone. He had no conception of an “ISP” and no idea what an “app” was. Up to that point all of his transactions had been over the phone, through snail mail or (gasp!) through interpersonal meetings. I had attempted to explain and demonstrate such things as email to both my parents but being the product of an analog world they met my efforts with soft smiles, blank stares and incomprehension. They had simply decided to deliberately ignore this revolution as if it was not happening, and for a while that worked for them. So my dad would call me up and ask to use my email address, since creating one for him would have been fruitless. As a result I was the only conduit for his financial transactions for a time, right up until his death. The ubiquity of the digital universe is so entrenched now that if they were still alive and consciously making day-to-day decisions on how to pay bills, obtain government documents, or even schedule/confirm many doctor’s appointments (all tasks that confront the elderly on a generally regular basis) I think that my parents would have been reduced to a state of maddening despair. You simply can’t do a lot of those things anymore without an internet connection, involving a smartphone or at least a desktop computer. Dealing with wholly automated “customer service” for pretty much anything now and the sheer impossibility of human-to human contact as it now exists would have left them feeling even more helpless and isolated. Their decision to cocoon themselves in a comforting denial would by now have ended up simply nullifying their relationship to the world around them in many respects, as it has for millions of people, rendering their very existence obsolescent, inconsequential to all but themselves. I was reminded of this during the debate about the (now mercifully, hopefully dead) SAVE Act, the GOP’s voter suppression scheme which proposed requiring the production of some type of identity verification establishing US citizenship in order to vote. As the custodian of my parents’ affairs I was pretty damn sure that neither of them still had their birth certificates. Those scraps of paper, tucked away in desk drawers, crumbled and folded into dust a long time ago or were lost/hopelessly buried in various moves. Nor did they have passports (the farthest they’d ever been abroad was ten miles into Canada, back when you didn’t need a passport to cross the border). So absent any help, they would have had to contact various state offices in some way to obtain duplicates of these documents. How would they have done this? First they’d have to determine which office to contact. But there are no more phone books providing that information. Even obtaining the number to call to determine which is the appropriate agency to contact requires some type of guidance. There are resources available to non-online seniors but how exactly does one know what those are, or how to contact them, without an internet connection to begin with? It’s really a cascading set of barriers, all of which were imposed by our society’s collective and largely passive acquiescence to this technological supremacy. For those millions of elderly Americans living in Assisted Living or nursing home facilities, the Republican-sponsored law would have left them few options to satisfy these new voting requirements. Absent willing children or other relations with enough time, interest and patience to navigate the labyrinthine passcode-protected, dual-stage authentication nightmare of interacting with state or federal agencies, those people would have simply had their voting rights yanked away by default, to say nothing of the undue burden that law would have placed on women whose birth certificates didn’t match their married names. As far as I know this glaring reality was barely even mentioned by the media in covering the SAVE abomination. This is why reactionary measures dreamed up to fulfill ideological obsessions always end up causing more problems than they fix. But I digress. Writing this, my first post in the new site format, has been an exercise in hovering, hunting and pecking. And it’s a pretty simple post. But I guess I had to start somewhere, even if my parents never did. Indiscipline Writer(s): Robert Fripp, William Scott Bruford, Adrian Belew, Anthony Charles Levin I do remember one thing. It took hours and hours but.. by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think. I carried it around with me for days and days.. playing little games like not looking at it for a whole day and then.. looking at it. to see if I still liked it. I did. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat.. The more I look at it, the more I like it. I do think it’s good. The fact is.. no matter how closely I study it, no matter how I take it apart, no matter how I break it down, It remains consistant. I wish you were here to see it. 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