Seven Reasons to Kill Your TV

ONE: The subconscious mind absorbs repetitious information, especially if that material comes at it in moving images. The conscious mind is unaware of the deleterious effects of television news, commercial programming and advertising. Because we can mute commercials, we assume we are not influenced by them. Marketers know better. They make a lot of money knowing better.

TWO: FEAR Television programming promotes fear. There were just as many pedophiles, rapists and murderers per hundred thousand population before television, but no one heard about them. Only the families of those raped and murdered fear such people. Now almost everyone does. That's just local fear. Consider world fear easily propagated for political and economic gain.

THREE: Newspapers and magazines carry similar stories and advertising, but you have to read them. You need to reach out to magazines and newspapers. They don't jump out at you in doctors' waiting rooms, airport lounges and restaurants, much as they might colorfully try.

FOUR: Children absorb everything they see uncritically. Their environments shape their inherited personalities. The more television they watch, the less independence they develop as adults, and, incidentally, the more weight they gain.

What Makes a Relationship Turn Sour? Find the answer and exciting new solution. Advice to Wives Whose Husbands Are Crabby Are You So Garrulous Your Husband Complains? Do You Make These Mistakes in Semantics?

FIVE: You may think that movies are similarly bad for us, but every movie has a beginning, middle, and an end. Television goes on forever. You can click from one TV movie to another to another without one thought about the meaning or significance of any one of them.

SIX: Real life gets confused with electronic life. People used to sit around the campfire and tell stories or stand around a piano and sing. Now they sit alone--even in the same room with others--and watch images of strangers performing something punctuated by dramatic commercials that come on really loud in case you forget to mute or can't find the remote. Social conversation is reduced to who is kicked off some reality show.

SEVEN: We are a nation at risk and don't know it. We watch newscasters and pundits discuss global warming and gas prices, talking to us as if we were a nation of idiots. We are a nation of idiots when we have forgotten how to see, smell, feel, touch taste and envision our own real lives.

These are just seven reasons why we should kill television and go out and play.

Two poems relevant to this rant:

On Stage—Live

Electronic entertainment
changes every year

evolving through alphabets
CD, DVD, HDTV,

full screen, flat screen
or tiny, hand-held screen.

But can it ever capture
that irrepressible spark

of flesh and blood
on stage—

real people
performing live

relating bodily
to each other

touching more senses
than simple sound and sight?

Electronic performance is to Live
as Internet porn is to Love.

Come to My Table, My Love

If you come to my class
you can learn syntax
and peer pressure

If you come to my meeting
you can learn how to vote
and quote

If you come to my home
you can watch MySpace
and hear I-tunes

But if you come to my table
and open your taste buds
you'll come alive, with me

***

Evelyn Cole, MA, MFA
The Whole-mind Writer