Kill Your Television
When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV. For a while, while living with my mom in Ojai, California, she made a deal with my sister and I, to give us each $100 if she took away the TV “forever”…. we both accepted the deal and went out to by stereos, records, and other stuff, and then lived without it until we left the house. I always have thought it was a great moment in parenting for my mom to come up with this plan since we kids agreed to it. I don’t ever remember complaining about it… we stuck with the deal until we left the house.
Both Sarah and I ended up being very creative and industrious adults, and I often wonder how much our lack of TV in those years contributed to this. We spent a lot of time coming up with unique games and other ways to entertain ourselves and the other kids in the neighborhood.
Here’s a great article on CNN about the damaging effects of TV on people and society as a whole, and the extreme extent to which Americans in particular are addicted to the “idiot box”:
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/30/a-nation-of-vidiots/
There are many websites dedicated to ending the culture of TV addiction, but one of the best is this:
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
One has to wonder if there’s any escape from this, except by replacing the TV with something even more addicting and better at marketing fear, consumerism, and war, to the population? It doesn’t help that they keep making so many damn good TV shows… I’ve been really impressed by a few that are out these days… “Game of Thrones”, “The Walking Dead”, “Fringe”, etc… we download the episodes online and watch them here, so at least we’re not subjected to commercials. But what would it be like to really turn off all these types of entertainment products, and simply experience real life all day, every day?
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