As seen on TV?

Thank goodness for television. Without it, people wouldn’t know what to buy, how to dress, where to shave or whom they belong with. Television brings people together so that everyone can share the same experiences whether they want to or not.  Even crazier is how “television” doesn’t just mean that box sitting in your “living room”.  With unlimited entertainment available via the internet we now access “television” via a computer, laptop or even a smartphone that we hold in our hands.

Consider how things were BTV – Before Television. Things were just, lousy.  Well, that’s how they must have been. Take the news. To get their news, people relied on radio, newspapers, word-of-mouth, revelations from deities or even smoke signals. Sometimes things would happen, important things like the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel or the twelfth century, and half the population in the world wouldn’t hear about it for years.  What a travesty!

Think of how much better things would have been if television had been around when important events in history happened. Like when Rome burned. Sure, the place still would have gone up in smoke but the Romans would at least have gotten to see it live, as it happened, on their flat screens. As it was, instead of tuning in to the nightly news on channel XIII, Romans had to go outside, open a window or stand in front of their own smoldering homes to enjoy the devastation.

Interestingly though, even without television historian Harry Sidebottom notes, that “the ancient city of Rome was a hotbed of class hatred, racial animosity, religious intolerance and sexual exploitation.”  So while television may be able to influence, humans have proven that it is not needed to bring out the worst in people.

Nowadays, people who pay attention when they watch television know that they must hang out with hot, large-breasted women or with sensitive, hunky guys. Of course hot women are occasionally allowed to hang out with goofy looking guys as long as those guys are shy but witty but that’s only if it’s with the right storyline. Makes perfect sense. Thank you, television.

But most important of all, TV helps everyone figure out what to buy. From term life-insurance to dandruff shampoo to medicine that helps with pretty much anything but may cause your nose to fall off without warning.  Television relieves everyone of the burden of choosing while shaming people who would otherwise save their hard-earned money into spending it on the same unnecessary trinkets the neighbors are spending their hard-earned money on.

We aren’t really knocking television or saying it’s bad.  As Ann Landers once said, “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.”  What we would like to suggest is be sure to set aside a little time to actually interact with each other…without the influence of advertisers or Hollywood.