TV

When did TV get to be the center of our lives?  Back before there was television, how were our living rooms arranged?  Probably the way my childhood living room was arranged.  Two love seats facing each other with a couple of other chairs near them all centered around a coffee table.  Where was the TV?  We didn’t have one.

I may have mentioned this in a previous posting but we didn’t have a TV for seven years when I was a child…from when I was around seven until I was fourteen.  Why?  My dad was watching it one night, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to be exact, and the TV just died.  Stopped working.  It was an old Zenith black and white television so it was bound to die sooner or later and it chose that moment to kick the bucket, so to speak.  My dad sat there staring at the dead set for a few minutes and decided that everyone would be better off if we just didn’t have the TV.  So he picked it up and carried it to the curb.  The next morning, I saw the TV out by the curb and asked him why it was there.  He said it had died.  I asked if we would get a new one.  He said no.  Why? I asked. Well, because I think you kids will get better grades without the TV distracting you, was the response.  And that was that.  No more TV.

Why do I bring this up now?  I am reading a really good book called The Shack.  I know I’m a little late in reading it because it came out in 2007 but it was in my stack of books I want to read and I picked it up last weekend and started in on it.  It is an unbelievably good book and I probably will write about it once I am done. In the mean time, I have decided that reading this book is much better than zoning out in front of the TV.  So the last couple of nights, I have turned off the TV, picked up my book and read until it was time to go to bed.  Of course, my living room is arranged so that all the furniture faces this big TV. As I am sitting reading, this TV screen is sitting there almost taunting me.  “Watch me…watch me… watch me…”. It is a little distracting.  This leads me to think about how so many people’s living rooms are now arranged around this inanimate object.  As if conversation, reading or listening to music is not even on the radar of evening activities anymore.  How did this aptly nicknamed “boob tube” get to be such a central figure in our lives?

I have decided that when I finally do buy a house, I really would like a separate room for the TV.  That would be ideal for me.  A living room with the furniture arranged for conversation, reading and listening to music and then a family room/TV room with the TV in it.  That way I can sit at night, read a book and not have the big inanimate object taunting me. I really can see my dad’s point.  TV does take up so much of our lives and it really is a tremendous waste of time.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy watching it and I do have my favorite shows I watch each week.  Not to mention watching a LOT of movies.  But it doesn’t need to be on continually.  It does have an off switch.  And I think it should be off as much as possible.  That way we can talk, and read, and listen to music and be happy, enlightened and fulfilled instead of mindless TV drones. Unless, of course, someone wants to be that way.  Just because I would rather not be a drone doesn’t mean that other people can’t be drones.  I would never tell someone they couldn’t be a drone if that is what they truly aspire to be. I just wanted to point out that there are other options in life.  Trying to be helpful.  That’s all.