A Million Little Nightmares

Okay, so I know I've given up television for a year, but I'm not strictly anti-television. It's true that tv shortens your life, uses up an undue amount of time, has basically been perpetuated in order to sell us stuff, and has killed small children by sheer force and weight. But it's not all bad.

Is it?

I was thinking of this during the recent earthquake in Haiti. If something like that happened 75 years ago, we probably wouldn't have even heard about it until weeks or months later. More people probably would have died if the entire world hadn't been immediately alerted as it was by television news networks. (By the way, if you haven't given toward the relief effort in Haiti yet and would like to, check out this link: http://www.worldvision.org/home.nsf/pages/home.htm )

Without television, all of those folks who received homes from Home Makeover would still be in their old circumstances. And Maile would probably weigh about fifteen pounds more than she currently does since she wouldn't have cried thall those buckets of tears.

If my kids were watching television right now I wouldn't have had to turn around and yell "don't pick her up by her feet!" Right now Abra's life would be better, or at least right-side up, if her siblings were glued to Dora or Super Why.

A suppose a lot of people have come to a belief in God because of television programming, and a lot of people have found old relatives, or watched the weather channel and avoided a rained out picnic, or discovered a new-favorite band on MTV or VH1 (actually I have never heard of anyone for whom this has happened, but I assume it must be true). I'm sure some folks have met their future spouse at a television event hosted at a common friend's house. That's good, right?

I guess I just feel like the television is a lot like the lottery - for all the schools and roads and old folks the lottery money takes care of, there's still way too many people buying lottery tickets with their food stamps. For every good thing the television accomplishes, there seem to be a million little nightmares . . . the child who stumbles across a pornography channel or the fact that the average American kid will have seen 16,000 murders by age 18 or the dad who watches television non-stop and doesn't take time for his kids.

Maybe I'm overstating things, I don't know. I hear someone shouting, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" (sorry Bryan, I had to go cliche on you guys) - plenty of people have good family time around the tube, or learn some cool stuff, or have their life changed for the better in some way or another.

I guess what I'm hoping is that my year without television will recenter me and that, if I return to television at some future date, I'll be more analytical about what I watch, make more of an effort for my tv watching to be a social event and not a sort of emotional/mental hibernation. I don't know. Maybe.

Or maybe January 1st 2011 will be the first time anyone has ever watched 24 straight hours of television on 6 different screens, 3 laptops and a mobile phone. Maybe I'll binge on tv. Who knows.