When I arrived at my Mom’s room in her nursing home yesterday to escort her to an appointment with her hearing aid people, Miracle Ear, she told me that my son, David, had called her from the Dominican Republic.

My son lives in California with his wife and three children. It struck me as unlikely that he would be calling Mom from the DR. Then Mom went on. David had been taking a taxi. They were stopped by the police. The taxi driver had marijuana in the trunk and claimed it was David. David needed bail money.

Mom told me that she told him that I handle all her money transactions and that she was sorry but she couldn’t help him.  She was, indeed, distraught.

My response was to tell her that it probably wasn’t David and that she had done well to refer them to me. I then texted David in California to confirm that he had not called Mom. Shockerini. He immediately texted back that he had not.

Mom was relieved. She had felt bad that she couldn’t help David.

As I manage my Mom’s affairs I am continually struck by how vulnerable the elderly are. I know. I know. I’M elderly. But still. Mom basically follows my advice. She and Eileen’s Mom offer us money all the time. It would be easy to drain their resources in a way that would hurt them.

I mentioned to Mom yesterday that not only were the elderly vulnerable, but that they were often taken advantage of by their own family.

I continue reading People Get Ready. As the jobless economy of large scale, global automation is upon us, it becomes apparent that the present economic situation is madness. A guaranteed income, shelter, health care and education makes sense when robots do all the work. But if the people draining off the profits continue to control decisions about how we live, we will become slaves not liberated human beings.

The liberation easily fits the way I see life. My Mom, anybody’s Mom, deserves to be taken care of in her old age despite her own private economic resources.

And as I always say, I have difficulty believing in money and property ownership. See this tree? It’s mine. What does that mean?

So a jobless economy to me evokes an crazy idealistic notion that there’s more to life than making enough money to live or even making lots of money. Stuff like making art, music and literature. Learning about stuff. Hell, learning about everything. Cooking!

I’m afraid that this direction is not exactly where we are heading or where we will end up. But Nichols and McChesney (and many other scholars) say we are on the precipice of a new and different time.

I believe that’s correct.