Those of us who are struggling with these issues probably have family members who would not get past your first intelligently well written posts and would just see the tl;dr as "Oh no, I'll bet anything my dingbat dumb blonde daughter Heather posts there! Google, make me a sammich and forward that grumpy cat meme to everyone in my address book!" or "My embarassing toothless luddite mother with the absurdly flowery name would love that stuff but fortunately she'll never see it because she refuses to carry a smartphone or even use a laptop that isn't a couple hundred years old".
I've had a [s]difficult[/s] normal life and it isn't going to end well. Some of you would probably think I made some incredibly bad choices and others would think I had some incredibly bad luck. I do have some experience with how the human body works, and like it or not, in times of stress, the more primitive parts of our brain take over and feelings shut off like a lightbulb. If you have to divorce the love of your life to protect your kids from a substance abuser, you do it. You just do it. You don't feel. You put one foot in front of the other and walk to the bus stop so you can fill out the papers to get the proper ID to open the bank account to deposit the check to hire the lawyer and you don't think. You feel happy when your five year old tells you it was the best day of her life because she got to climb a tree at the bus stop, but you don't feel anything else. You can't. Protecting kids is easy. They're biological organisms and so are we. Protecting concepts like free software is going to be a bit harder, to put it politely. rms was so devastated at one point when he saw this coming as a young man that his "go to" answer when people asked what was wrong with him was that someone he loved had just died because he honestly couldn't go out in public grieving like that without an "acceptable" reason. You 13-35ish people are probably going to doubt yourselves and possibly even your own sanities, brilliance, talents, and intelligence. I am old. I see it already. I see brilliant children who make concrete positive differences in the lives of real people wasting time blaming themselves for not having powers that no human being has. I am old. I know. Do as I say, not as I did. Be kind to yourselves. I wasn't kind to myself and look how I turned out. Patterns repeat. This is bigger than whether or not one individual should accept an unwanted gift of a cellphone or not. You may think you can't survive in a surveillance society where everybody you love thinks you're crazy but I am old and that is my superpower and I think you are a lot stronger than you give yourselves credit for. Thank you for starting this thread and apologies for the lame post to get it back on topic. Any opinions on how an average user with no formal IT training and/or paid mainstream employment history (or a toofless iggernut hag if that is how you say it in your language) can be an effective ally are greatly appreciated but essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. :)
