While visiting my parents over the recent holidays at their home in Chandler, Arizona, something went missing. We didn’t call the police. We didn’t file a report. We knew it was coming, and it was a sanctioned event. Our loss was personal and yet shared by many that day. In one fell swoop, it was the loss of ritual and the loss of information. And it was the loss of advertisements, the ones that have been riding shotgun in the American version of both for so long that our older citizens now have little choice but to find them comforting. Of course, many forms of loss are reported in the paper. But this wasn’t. Because our loss was the paper.

Metropolitan Phoenix’s East Valley Tribune is the largest newspaper in the country to reduce its print days to four, leaving the remaining three to be covered online exclusively. And it has restricted home delivery in certain suburbs including Chandler, Scottsdale, and Tempe, home of Arizona State University. (Let that one soak for a second.) And this is just one newspaper in one town. The industry nationwide has actually been in peril for several years, causing the Associated Press to deploy the term, “tsunami,” when quoting an industry observer describing the experience of the modern newspaper.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that our own Oregonian has begun to slide down the same slippery slope by combining sections into longer, fatter folds with different titles. Of course, being here, the editors cited sustainability practices as one of the reasons for the change, but come on, we’re adults here. If there were more advertisers drawing from their ink, they would clear every forest necessary to supply their consumer public with fresh tales of all the sales.

But even if it weren’t about the bottom line, does it really benefit the world to save a tree by putting Grandma and Grandpa further out to pasture?

And there rests the rub. Regardless of whether the cause of newspaper hardship is an economic slump, competition from online advertising options, or pressure to move toward ever greener approaches, the problem is in actuality just one more symptom on the way to the cancerous outcome of ensuring that our older citizens are systematically sewn out of the loop.

Think about it. Their newspaper is a ghost. Their televisions with the rabbit ears and roof antennas—once state of the art and now all that can be afforded on paltry Social Security checks—will be effectively off the hook come February. So how are they supposed to get the headlines? The nightly news? How are they supposed to be included in the country’s affairs? How are they supposed to know what’s going on in the rest of the world? The answer is they won’t.

Oh sure, they can go online. But how? Most senior citizens have bunions older than the Internet. The technology, or at least its rampant accessibility, is too new for most of them to have learned in any kind of organic fashion—even if they could afford it. In the case of my parents, they’ve led productive, successful lives, owning more than one business of their own. They used and enjoyed the technologies of their time, raised oodles of children, maintained all of their faculties, and remain an active part of the social dance. But at eighty, they do not Google, check their homepage, shop online, or meet friends on Facebook. Their eyes glaze at terms like, “browser” and “server,” and the frustration only mounts when they’re told to, “open the attachment,” or, “follow the link.”

And in case you find my parents quaint or cute in their outmoded way of life—and therefore so very different than you and I with our iEverything—just wait. But not for long. Because at our current rate of technological change, obsolescence will occur faster and faster to younger and younger people. The same Internet that has brought the globe together will widen and quicken generation gaps to heretofore unseen chasms.

Further, the implications for writers in these changing times are at once obvious and perhaps paranoid. Will the page really die? Will all reading and writing—no matter the language of origin—eventually occur through binary translation glowing on a screen? Will the eloquence per byte ratio be the new gold standard?

If this rant appears to be proposing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, rest assured, it is not. As an avowed Internet junkie, I am committed to sustaining my habit. I love my laptop and my iPhone and go nowhere without one or both. I do however hope that the world never sees a time when the written word is entirely replaced by digital matter. It is my wish that Sunday mornings can still mean reading the paper, section after section, flipping through the actual pages, not scrolling and clicking.

Call me old-fashioned. Call my folks old-fashioned. But there is a tactile intimacy that cannot be divorced from the written word without, to my way of thinking, dire consequences. And one of those results is already being felt in this sad exclusion of our older citizens who did nothing more to deserve their treatment than to lay the foundations for the fancy advances we now enjoy.

In the coming week, we're laying a new foundation with a new president who represents what America has forgotten to be. If we're truly to embrace the Obama steps we're taking, then they should be mined for all aspects of the inclusion that they not only imply but herald.