Something funny happened to our TV this summer. Now that we have thought about it, we can’t remember the exact date it happened because we didn’t think too much of it at the time. But sometime in early June of this year, we turned our television OFF. Now here is the kicker, we haven’t turned it back on. Why the TV Police haven’t shown up at our door demanding that we act like good Americans and watch seven or eight hours of television a day is a mystery.
I haven’t seen a single newscast, local or national and guess what? I pretty much know what’s going on in the world and feel damn good about it, downright morally superior you might say. The difference is I’m not walking around angry, tense or uptight as if I could change anything the boneheads in Washington are up to. They have yet, after forty some odd years of voting, to ever call me up and say “Rod, what ya think we ought to do?”
I surf the net and if a story appears that I might be interested in, I check it out. If the story starts pissing me off, I click to the next one. There is something about just reading the story, instead of hearing it told to me in the slant that the news people want to give, that makes a difference.
I’m sure at some point we will turn it back on. There are a number of programs we like to watch and when the new season starts back up, we will probably check them out. Maybe…… I think there was a pretty good reason someone named television The Boob Tube back in the early sixties. It really is a brain drain. Instead of being zoned out in front of the tube, we have spent most of that time, Reading.
I know, we could be spending the time looking at the soaps so we could compare our selves to fictional people who have scripted lives that are a never ending drama or letting Dr. Phil tell us how screwed up we are. Or watching Oprah show us how many fabulous friends she has or Simon Cowell berate some poor dippy kid in front of millions of people but we just read rather than shrink our brains down to zombie land.
All in all it has been a great summer and I don’t feel like I have missed a single thing.
The more I think about it, we may have to continue this good life right into the fall.
We watch ABC 13 local news because they make us laugh...they have the worst reporters and the worst writers on TV! But as for regular TV watching - it's mostly the Food Network and Travel Channel. It's hard to get angry at good food and fun places to go!
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