Non-Internet-Pros Know It Should Be Ubiquitous
The Internet has been my financial life-blood for the last 17 years so of course I think it should spread like wildfire. What I realized on Superbowl Sunday was, it’s (The Internet) the life-blood of everyone else too.
Towards the end of our Superbowl party a couple of moms (Kerri included) were laughing about how they used to beg their parents to drive them to the Thousand Oaks library to look up the history of this or that for a paper they were working on. And as I jumped in, I explained how I used to ride my bike to the Agoura library for the same sort of thing. At the moment it was somewhat of a pissing match on who had to work harder to get to the house of books and how hard family life was back then (walking barefoot through the snow, to and from school, uphill both ways, blah). But then we chuckled at how my daughter uses her iPad to look things up, right alongside her textbooks and homework papers. It was pretty funny.
But then we turned a bit more serious and, despite our relative differences, agreed on how much “always-on” internet access gave our kids an edge. A huge edge! We talked briefly about SOPA and PIPA and ACTA (ick!). Without the real details we all, from differing points of view on many things, saw clearly that an open internet levels the playing field more easily than so many more difficult gigs.
If your family is poor and can’t afford a computer with high-speed internet access or you live in a rural area where high-speed internet is not reasonably available, you’re at a significant disadvantage. Our country is supposed to be better than that. But we’re not…
Right now I cannot get DSL or Fiber to my home (without insane pricing) so I’m stuck with my cable provider; They (the cable provider) know this and do not feel the need to compete. That’s sucky for me because it would make my life “easier”, but it’s a tragedy for kids .
I’ve read many times about how expensive it is to be poor. You pay a bill late or bounce a check and you pay hefty fees. You don’t have time to make dinner at home so you buy fast food which is vastly more expensive than making a meal from more raw ingredients. Add “taking the kid to the library” to the list. It’s brutal.
I’ve been a GOP-ish conservative all my life and I still believe in what it once meant but the power that the telcos and media (okay, “Big Oil ” too, happy?) wield at the expense of our younger generation (our future!) cannot be overlooked any longer. Trading President Obama for Mitt Romney does nothing for the helpless who are most likely our greatest untapped resource.
Access to the internet needs to be ubiquitous. Money should not be a factor. It’s more important than Solyndra and its bullshit promise of alternative energy. It’s more important than paying the Auto Worker’s Union’s underfunded and insane pension plans. It’s more important than funding a war that we never had the will to win (and I admit, I was for the Iraq war initially). Ubiquitous access to the internet is certainly more important than trying to sustain an out-dated business model that seeks to trump our future to ensure that everyone buys one of their buggy whips (that’s you, “Big Media”).