Good Bye T.V... I Want My Life Back

I wrestle with so many things with "fuzzy" lines of morality. Homeschool vs public, secular music, tv. If only you could step inside my head for a moment, you would understand the constant state of turbulence it is in. While I can so easily slip into legalism, I can also fall the other way too.

For most of our married life, my husband and I didn't have a TV. We stood against what we knew it would do to our minds, and the minds of our children. Well, we all have weak moments, and last Spring we decided to get the Dish. It all started harmlessly with us wanting to hear the news (our local paper is quite insufficient). Last summer, I got a phone call offering a special 3 month trial on a "package" programing. Tempted by the bargain, and my desire to watch the Travel channel I agreed. What's the harm in three months? Right?

Six months later, we not only still have these channels, but we have made TV our family hobby. We used to read, talk, play games, and explore the outdoors. Our time as a family knitted us together, it kept us unique. Now, the second my husband gets home the TV goes on, and stays on until bed. Even our weekends have slowly started to have the TV fill it's hours.

Our sensitivity has gone way down to the terrible things it indoctrinates us with. We used to be disgusted with most programs, and turn them off. Now I hear words and ideals my children should never hear, being force feed to them while us, their parents sit iddley by.

Today, I got rid of the TV. Not the literal box, it sits silently in my living room, closed behind hutch doors, but it's forced content is gone. Not even local channels come in, and I couldn't be happier.

My conviction to get rid of it started the day I got it. Sadly, it took evidence of rotting fruit to get me to act on that conviction. Now, like a weight lifted off my shoulders, it is gone! Obedience feels good.

Before I go, I want to share with you a comment that really spoke to me from my last post.

When I was very young, we didn't have television. When we finally got it, there were few shows on and a lot of dead time where the television, if turned on, looked like snow. It was really a novelty and when used, it was a family event, not something to keep boredom at bay.

When I was a kid, we used our imaginations (a lot). I remember being engrossed in digging a hole to China (for days!) We would put our ears to the ground and convince each other that we could hear people speaking Chinese. I remember building a city for fairies to live in. I remember looking for four leaf clovers for hours on end. I remember hop scotch, jacks, marbles, and jumpropes.

I remember mud pies, daisy chains, and setting a trap to catch squirrels (never did catch one but almost did a few times). We made bug hospitals and I remember playing hide and seek with all the kids in the neighborhood after dark on warm summer evenings. I remember snow forts, sledding, and snowball fights.

When it was too cold to be outside, I remember listening to the radio (They didn't have talk shows but they had comedy skits and stories and I could close my eyes and listen to more than just music). I wrote poetry and stories, we created plays and put together circus acts. I still remember painting baloons black to look like huge barbells and making a lion's mane out of an old dust mop my mom had.

We spread a blanket over the dining room table and made a fort. We took all the cushions off the furniture and pretended they were boats floating on a sea of carpet. We took an old mattress and spent hours sliding down the basement stairs on it. It was just as fun as sledding and much warmer. Cardboard boxes were turned in to cars, airplanes and doll houses.

As I got older, I learned to bake cookies and bread and took them to neighbors. I had embroidery projects that I could work on. I put models together and painted them. We pretended we were secret agents and left secret messages for each other. Oddly enough, one of the last times I went home for a reunion, we talked about this and checked our hiding place and found the last (secret agent) message we had created still in that spot.

All of these things were done with a sense of wonder. Anything was possible when I was a child.

Television, the internet, and video games have changed all that. Our children are being forced to grow up too fast and because they are inundated with "reality" they aren't being given a chance to develop their imagination. I think it's kind of tragic that our children can't think of anything to do if it doesn't entail something that entertains them. Instead, they should be learning to entertain themselves.

What's really sad is that if you mention most of these activities to kids today, they will turn their noses up and say that it doesn't sound fun to them. That's what a loss of innocense does.

Well, enough from an old woman, I'm going to step off my soapbox and go visit my fairy village. ~ GG

AMEN!