I guess it's that time of the year again - time for a voluntary moratorium on television. It's a moot point for us. We are entering our ninth month without television. We find ourselves in good company. Like Stacy Teicher, a Christian Science Monitor columnist, our TV-less experiment has morphed into a lifestyle. I like it.
Having broken away from the box, I now see the medium of television as a strange, contrived, manipulative beast. Ms. Teicher commented that, as a result of her TV exile, "I found myself resensitized, no longer absorbing images without noticing their warp speed."
My dad used to lament that violent TV images caused people to become desensitized. How right he is. Over the Easter weekend, we found ourselves in an environment in which TV was the focal point. The Terri Schiavo debacle dominated the 24 hour news channels. It was decreed by someone in our group that the channel was to be changed immediately. Fair enough. But that same someone chose, for purposes of entertainment, to watch an episode of CSI in which the plot focussed on the gruesome murder and literal butchering of a chef. These stylized images were absorbed without a blink.
As Bono sings,
And it's true we are immune/
When fact is fiction/
And TV, reality
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