There is a crime being committed in the vast majority of American households every day. As you read this, it is quite possible that this very crime is being committed somewhere in your house, certainly somewhere in your neighborhood. The crime? Nothing short of murder. Yes, you heard me right … murder! This crime to which I refer is the murder of thought processes by that large, rectangular box you call a television! Yes, you heard me … that seemingly innocent, mindless form of entertainment is guilty of killing hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of innocent thought processes every day, ensuring that those thoughts do not grow into full-blown actions, ideas or innovations. My elders used to tell me that watching television would “rot {my} brain”. Of course I scoffed at the idea, but I can tell you with no uncertainty that it is true … at the very least, an excess of television and specifically mindless programming will stunt all coherent and intellectual thought processes. I tell you this, not as a casual observer, but from personal experience.

While I have never been much of a television watcher, it was my habit, until recently, to wake up in the morning and turn on set in the bedroom, watching intermittently as I went through my morning routine of tooth-brushing, bed-making, straightening, bathroom-cleaning, etc. I noticed, but did not make the connection, that upon waking I usually had some seemingly random thought or another that I wanted to follow through on, but by the time I finished my upstairs chores and made it downstairs to the computer, the thought was long gone, never to return. If I even remembered the thought, I didn’t remember why I thought it was note-worthy to begin with. Then one day a week or so ago, I awoke a bit late and, knowing I had much to accomplish and needed to hurry a bit, I did not turn on the television. By the time I sat down at the computer a bit later, my first-of-the-day thought had blossomed into a full-fledged thought process and was crying to be put on paper (okay, disk). WOW! I was amazed to find that it had survived the morning and fully matured in the process! So of course I had to think about why and how this happened. I wondered if it might have been the lack of incessant CNN voices stepping all over my poor fledgling thought, so I decided to experiment and the next day I left the television cold and dark during my morning routine. Once again, a thought came, formed, matured and I found I had gained some valuable insight into a topic that I shall not divulge here, as the writing of it remains a work in process.

Now, I watch, on average, an hour of CNN in the morning and catch an occasional episode of NCIS and that about sums up my television watching time. My daughter usually turns the set on late in the evening for an hour or two, and while I may glance at it from time to time, for the most part I tune it out, as I am usually studying, reading or writing (okay, or sometimes playing Farmville or Words With Friends). Once a week I watch an episode of Rugrats with my granddaughter at midnight for 30 minutes. Other than that, it is rare that I even turn the thing on, so I figure I haven’t killed too many thought processes along the way, but what worries me is our society as a whole. How many people turn it on as soon as they get up and stay basically glued to it until they go to bed at night? I know some, at least. So, the first part of the problem is quantitative … the number of hours spent watching. The second part of the problem is of equal, if not greater concern, and that is the quality, actually lack of quality, programming available. This is certainly a topic that could be the subject of a separate blog in and of itself, if not an entire book, but I will just briefly mention a few things here.

• Sports seem like a healthy enough activity … if you are actually engaged in the activity. Even watching your favorite team once or twice a week doesn’t seem like a problem, but I know people who will flip from one game to another for 12 continuous hours a day on weekends, not out of any particular interest in the teams playing, but just to see a ball of some sort being moved in some manner.
• Reality shows have always puzzled me in their popularity. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to watch some other family going about their daily lives! Don’t the people who watch these shows have their own daily lives to go about? And it isn’t even as if the networks choose intellectual or interesting people to shadow … people are watching dopeheads like Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons, airheads like those Kardashian people and that woman that had octuplets on purpose, and backward bigots like Papa Duck and family. Some tell me they watch these things for the humour value, but I still don’t get it … if I want humour, I will watch my kitties at play, tell myself a joke, or read some of my friends facebook posts!
• Sitcoms used to be funny. I think back to some of the situations (sitcom stands, by the way, for situational comedy) that Gilligan and the Skipper used to find themselves in, or the pickles that Lucy Ricardo created, Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, All in the Family … all funny shows, albeit relatively mindless entertainment. Today, I cannot even stand to sit through a full episode of any of them with the possible exception of Modern Family, and I think that is mainly because I appreciate the fact that they promote the social values of tolerance and equality.

So now you are asking yourself why I care, what business is it of mine, right? Well, go turn off the television so you can think about this for a minute. The Industrial Revolution came about before television was invented. Our lives today would be largely agrarian and television would never have been invented, nor the automobile, the refrigerator, washing machine nor computer, were it not for the Industrial Revolution, right? Now, the inventions that gave rise to the industrial revolution were the result of what? Yes, thought processes. Every invention known to mankind began as a thought, a tiny seed that matured into a full-fledged thought, was put onto paper and eventually implemented as a prototype in somebody’s basement or garage. Now, if we are all killing our thoughts in their infancy, how the hell does anybody think there will ever be another great idea or invention? Or, more to the point, there will be new inventions, because in many other cultures television is far less popular than in America, but keep in mind that our economic future, the future of this nation, depends on our ability to be competitive in the marketplace. If we are all home watching Duck Dynasty while the Chinese, Japanese and Germans are busily thinking and promoting their thoughts …. well, are you getting a clearer picture now? No, not on the television … I told you to turn that off … I’m referring to the picture in your head. To conclude, I would like to quote Swami Vivekananda, an Indian Hindu monk and 19th century disciple: “We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.” So let us turn off the television more often and allow some of those thoughts to live and travel!