By Dan Irvin
My wife shares my love of college basketball so we just spent a second consecutive weekend of immersion in the tournament.
Along about bedtime on Sunday I couldn’t find my cell phone. We finally found it under the couch, upon which I had spent virtually the whole of Sunday evening.
I’ve bought-into the whole smartphone thing, though I came to it late in life. No need for the library at Alexandria. I have the whole of human thought and experience in my pocket. Plus a high-res camera, clock, calendar, entertainment system, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and telephone.
But I’m worried. It occurs to me that the smart phone is just another thing that our society has adopted that widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Certainly all the wonders of the modern mobile phone give one extraordinary advantages over those who cannot afford the technology.
All three of our kids went through a social justice experience at church where they spent a night in a local parking lot surviving in a cardboard box. Oh, I know, it’s a sweeping simplification of what it’s like to be homeless, but hopefully it started them thinking at least.
Well it’s a lot easier today to get a different sort of inkling of one tiny aspect of what it’s like to be poor or at least disenfranchised. Try throwing that phone in a drawer for a day, or a week. I freaked the heck out just losing mine for fifteen minutes.
Coincidentally, I recently saw a presentation by Home Sweet Home Ministries CEO Mary Ann Pullin through which I learned that, next year, H-S-H-M will celebrate 100 years of serving the less-fortunate of our community.
Tell you what. Next time you’re waiting in line at Starbuck’s, or bored with what’s on your big screen TV, put that smart phone to some use and check out the Home Sweet Home Ministries story. Maybe we can collectively follow their example to make this an even better place, for more of us.
Dan Irvin is Vice-President of the Bloomington Public Library Foundation Board, and a member of the Heartland Community College Foundation Board.
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