Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, thanks to a $100,000 medical device known as the re-walk personal exoskeleton,

former horse jockey Michael Strait learned to walk again, five years after being paralyzed from the waist down after a

riding accident. By supporting his limbs and artificially moving his legs, the machine helped Strait

return to a more normal life. And he has since taken over 370,000 steps. However, this past summer,

a small wire in the device came loose and caused it

to stop working. And when Strait asked the company for technical support to fix the device,

he was told they did not service machines more than five years old. Strait was, of course,

shocked. He told a horse racing news outlet, quote, it's not fair to people like me, as hard as a

paraplegic's life is, and they're making it harder. I just don't understand how they can say that

after five years, a $100,000 machine is not worth anything. That's hard to believe, end quote.

Well, thankfully, with the help of enough media coverage, the company changed course and repaired

straits walking device. They did not, however, commit to future repairs, leaving Strait and others like

him at the mercy of technicians and company policies. In other words, despite all of the

promises of medical and technological miracles, the human factor still remains. In his masterful

book, Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis offered an essential tempering on all of the hype surrounding technological progress.

Modern man's conquest of nature, he thought, is not as neutral as we're often told.

Quote, what we call man's power over nature, he wrote, turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men

with nature as its instrument, end quote. And of course, the greater power that these some men have

means the greater potential for corruption. Lord Acton's observation that, quote, power corrupts,

and absolute power absolutely applies whether the power achieved is by political or

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