My father recently suffered a series of strokes. As I’ve spent hours by his bedside, it’s allowed me to consider a large population of our society that are totally out of the loop. About eight years ago, before my father became unable to use his hands and suffered from dementia, I tried to set him up on a computer and e-mail so that we could easily keep in touch. In the past, Dad was a man who loved ham radio and anything to do with communicating over the airwaves. I remember Sunday mornings as a child, Dad would disappear into his office while the rest of us were getting ready for church, turn up the volume on his ham radio, and spurt out “CQ, CQ, CQ6, this is Lyle, ‘L’ as in Larry, ‘Y’ as in yellow, ‘L’ as is Larry, ‘E’ as in Edgar, over.” The same man in his 70s just couldn’t get the hang of computers or the Internet. I must confess that much of it was probably due to the onset of dementia, but it seems to me that a computer would have been a natural progression from a ham radio. I can picture my father as a younger man, blogging with his ham radio buddies.
Two years ago, when the government enacted the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan and when the elderly were to find and signup for a plan, I found myself faced with doing the leg work for my father. If he’d had to do it for himself, he would not have had access to the Internet and couldn’t hear well enough to make the phone call to the toll free 800 number that no one answered anyway (I tried it). My only hope was to go to the Internet, guess at some things, type in what I knew and press ENTER. As an aside, Dad pays more for the plan then he gets as a discount. He makes a $29.00 a month payment and get $25.00 reduced from his $350.00 a month presciption bill. I’m not sure if this is by design on the part of the legislature and insurance companies, but I wouldn’t put it past the insurance companies to have lobbied for just that situation. One of my father’s friends tried to stop his payments to the prescription drug plan because he found that he was paying out more than the discount. He started the process of “unregistering” from the program six months ago and to date has not been able to stop the payments to the insurance company. He made the mistake of having the payments taken out of his Social Security check. It is criminal to take advantage of the elderly and the helpless.
I’ve digressed from my original thoughts. I’m not sure that we can fill the gap to bring the majority of the elderly into the computer age. Of course, there are senior citizens that spend all day on the computer. They are probably a bit younger than my father. Check this site out to see how seniors citizens today are breaking the stereotype senior bloggers. I’m sure that there are researchers with huge NSF grants that are studying how to fill the gap. In the mean time, there is a generation of individuals that are being left behind and uninformed.
Blogging in the school library 
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