Turn Off Your TV, Please!

I do not want this article to sound like a lecture or a sermon. Like a reformed smoker or drinker, I am a reformed television watcher. I detest television. I don’t own one; I don’t want one and haven’t watched one in over 5 years. I don’t know what’s on, current shows or even current stars. I pick up a copy of People magazine and hardly recognize a soul in it. The only time I see a TV is when I go into a restaurant a get trapped at a table with a view. Now it is a curiosity to see one on.

Over 5 years ago, a friend needed a television. I wasn’t able to watch mine very often due to my work schedule, so I gave it to him with the intention of purchasing a new one when the World Series started. That year, the World Series was Miami, a team in which I had less than no interest (sorry, all you Miami fans). Once I had gone 18 months without watching TV, I was completely ‘out of the loop’ and no longer cared about it. Now, when I go on a house call or even to a friend’s home, I think it rude of them to leave the television running. I often request that it be turned off.

What has always disturbed me about television, even when I was involved, was the inaneness, the time-wastefulness, the mindlessness, and the constant racket. Now that I am reformed, I find it way more offensive and pervasive, to the point of being a dangerous influence and serious detriment to human progress and development. If you were to invite friends into your home and they carried on like they so commonly do on television: the loud, boisterousness, the cutting sarcasm, the personal putdowns and the sexual innuendos, you’d never invite them back. And yet, night after night, these people are allowed into your living room to ‘entertain’ you. From an objective and rational point of view, it is ludicrous.

Like it or not, you are influenced strongly by television. Listen to the conversations of the work place or among friends at a party or sport field. Aping the latest sitcom is cool and fashionable. We get most of our latest expressions and idiom from that reprehensible source…television. Even vocal inflection and sentence structure often comes from TV personalities. We are a generation of watchers not doers. Never mind the effect of television on our physical fitness, what about our mental fitness? Continual television gazing has the same effect on your sub-consciousness, as does hypnosis; the filters of critical thought are suppressed, discretion is on hold, maturity regresses and humour degenerates. You are influenced how to think, what to buy, how to dress; your political opinions are formed, and your interests are directed. I remember being in a café in a small Ohio town several years ago for breakfast and listening furtively to the conversation all around me. At every table people were talking about the Simpson trial as if it were an historical event on par with the Declaration of Independence. I was sad.

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