Yesterday my friend Nigel posted a piece about ninety-year-olds having to use a smartphone to access basic rights:
‘,,,everything has become an app, a code, a portal. The very people who built this country… now find themselves illiterate in their own homes. If booking a medical appointment or paying a bill requires the help of a son or granddaughter – assuming there is one – then the system has failed.
This is not innovation. It is exclusion…’
Yesterday Cliff beat Terry in an exciting final of our Men’s Shed pool competition. Cliff excluded the rest of us from winning. That’s the nature of the competition – there can only be one winner.
About ninety children and young people auditioned last weekend for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – The Seagull Theatre’s Christmas show. Yesterday the cast list – involving thirty-five children – was published. Many children are excluded. That’s the nature of auditions. It’s tough.
On Sunday Stephen told Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet: A man invites guests to a banquet. They make excuses, choosing to exclude themselves from the banquet. That’s the nature of invitations – you can refuse them.
The story continues… ‘The poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’ are invited and included…
Gary and Annie Jackson from Cambridge were on last night’s news.
Their son Harry, was born with an abnormality of the bowel; he developed intestinal failure-associated liver disease.
Harry was excluded from enjoying a good, healthy childhood. That’s the nature of health. Good health and ill health are randomly distributed.
Tests revealed that Gary, was a suitable match for organ donation. He lost six stone, followed a strict diet and stayed focused for months to make sure he was healthy. In a long, complex operation twenty percent of Gary’s liver and one-and-a-half metres of his small bowel were removed and ‘given’ to Harry.
Gary’s actions moved Harry from excluded to included.
Musing… When exclusion is OK… When it’s difficult, but has to be accepted… When I should do something to enable the excluded to be included.
I think you and I were rather in agreement about Prize Giving. It is important to reward pupils’ hard work. But I hated seeing the little kid who never got anything no matter how hard they tried.
I think competitive sport is perfectly acceptable and dare I say is character building in its own way. Plus the players,professionally anyway, have honed their skills to a fine art.
By the way, if that’s Nigel in the picture then there’s nothing better than a cream tea with fruit scones, clotted cream and jam on top. Not that that is any consolation for what he describes. We are lucky we are reasonably IT literate. But, if one hasn’t had a job that required IT skills then old age must be a nightmare.
I wouldn’t be able to access Malcolmsmusings for a start.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad after all.
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I think Nigel’s post resonated with me because I know several folks around our sort of age who find IT stuff both really difficult, and a source of great anxiety. It certainly excludes them from many areas of life.
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I completely agree that several folks are excluded.
But I think my biggest worry now is how many first level jobs that youngsters without too many qualifications could have done are being completely eliminated by AI.
As I’ve written before, AI will hopefully lead to so much better medical services. But, it will also lead to a lot of obsolete jobs.
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I completely agree with Nigel!
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I think it’s a problem that many of us are aware of, Dana, but I’m not sure what the answer is. It certainly does question how we define ‘progress’
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I agree.
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Amen Malcolm. The exclusion of the aged in today’s digital world daily takes its tool on my wife whose memory is rapidly slipping away. I struggle also trying to determine how to do something to enable my darling cuber-excluded spouse to feel included and ease her frustration. I value your prayers for her to join mine for His solution brother as we …
Keep Looking Up ^ … His Best is Yet to Come!
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I share similar frustrations and struggles. I also share your response – to pray for today’s problems and look forward to God’s best future.
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