It’s one of those days. A day when you think that all there is to do is sit in front of the television and eat as much junk food as your body can hold. You waste the whole day doing nothing, and then, an epiphany. What did people my age do on days like these back when there was no TV? When there was no television, teens had to find other ways to occupy their time. Some used their time to do other activities, such as sports or hobbies. Others used the time to improve their education, or spend time with their family and friends. No matter what, something they were doing was useful. Now, what would YOU be doing? It’s going to be hard to think, because many of us have never known a life without the tube. In his article, "The Argument against TV," Corbett Trubey writes, "People like to think that television is one of the best inventions of the 20th century, and it just might have been. Unfortunately, our old friends greed and sloth entered the picture and transformed it into a 24-hour ad-plastered, brainwashing, individuality bleaching, stereotyping, couch-potato-making tool of society." This statement is 100% true. TV has consumed our time, and taken innocence away from most children.
Again, we come back to the issue of time. Not enough time in the day, week, month, year. Now, sit back and think about how much time you spend watching TV, and subtract that from your everyday schedule. The average person watches 9 years of television in their entire life. That’s a lot of time that you could have back. What could have you been doing during those moments? Work on school assignments, learn another language, master tap dancing; the possibilities are endless. Whenever we have down time, we tend to gravitate towards plopping down in front of the television before thinking of doing anything productive. The allotment for doing whatever we please is limited for sure, but it should not be wasted.
You most likely have seen all the advertisements for those video games, you know, the ones where you win by killing as many people as possible? It is hard to believe that now there are games that young ones play where you get a reward for doing something so horrible. Kids are being exposed to things that they shouldn’t be exposed to yet, if even at all, and at such a young age. Children all over the place are performing random acts of bestiality and destructiveness - both to themselves and others - because they think that it is normal. Television plays a huge role in influencing this type of behavior. You see an advertisement for a movie where someone is praised for killing everyone in sight, there is a music video where people are smoking or drinking alcohol, or a commercial for condoms. Does the person in charge of approving this type of media not understand that young people are watching this? Before TV exposed these obscenities, all kids had to worry about was who was going to be on their backyard baseball team for the upcoming weekend. Now they want to get fake guns and pretend to shoot each other, and little girls are saying that they are ugly because they aren’t as skinny as the Victoria’s Secret model on the commercial they just saw. The innocence of our generation’s children is at stake, and it is high time that we do something about it.
Now there are some good things you might say came about from television. People are so much more exposed to the world now then they were before it existed, and are able to know current events almost right as they happen. But, thinking of all of the negatives, it outweighs the alternative. TV has absorbed the time spent doing anything productive in our day, and stripped children of their incorruptibility. The reasons could go on and on.
Groucho Marx once said, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” Let us all learn from his humorous yet wise remark. Ignore the quiet beckoning coming from the box in the corner the next time you are having “one of those days”, and always keep in mind the fact that going out and living your life to the fullest is much more important than sitting down and getting caught up in a fake on one thanks to our old friend, Television.
