Watching The Wasteland

In many respects, I believe television is a vast wasteland, so I limit sofa slob time to a few weekend hours, enjoying NASCAR.

I quit watching professional football because some players wear their hair like women, cavort like clowns in the end zone, complain because they’re underpaid (many barely making more in a few Sunday afternoon hours than average working stiffs make in decades), and forget that they are youngsters’ role models. I’m an old-fashioned Southern gentleman who doesn’t endorse such self-centered irresponsibility by viewing it. My children deride such notions, claiming I’m too dogmatized to allow myself to be … ahem … enlightened. They wouldn’t think that, had they known my football coach, Dr. J. T. Hall. I remember one of his pre-game admonitions: “Always comport yourselves like gentlemen. If you score a touchdown, recover a fumble, or intercept a pass, hand the ball to an official, hustle to the sideline and rejoin your teammates.”

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Coach is alive and well, and I’m sure he disapproves of the pro football antics television replays ad nauseam. Admittedly, if television had been available when I was young, I would have preferred couch slouching and junk food feasting instead of reading the classics, but when television came along, my cotton farming dad was barely making ends meet while staggering through a string of bad crop years, and I was fledged from the nest before that festering canker on American living rooms became ubiquitous and permanent.

Television’s deleterious effects on America’s youth — physically, mentally, and morally

Television’s deleterious effects on America’s youth — physically, mentally, and morally — is especially worrisome. In 1969, I taught college freshmen who were prepared academically to master demanding curricula. They were well-behaved, clean cut, and brimming with good health because they spent leisure time being physically active, either working to supplement the family income or playing sports — not watching television while gorging on fattening, unhealthy junk food. I now teach freshmen who are blessed with the same mental acuity as those in the Sixties, but through no fault of their own or of previous teachers, some are academically ill-prepared for college work. I blame television, and here’s why: People who enjoy reading books exercise their minds to the fullest. Even the most articulate writers can fill in only so many gaps while maintaining a discernible, interesting story line, meaning readers must engage in mind-building mental gymnastics to share fully what writers see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Conversely, when youngster flop down in front of televisions, many of the tasks reading demands are done for them. There are fewer gaps to fill. And, worse, because of the secular, subliminal snippets television uses to glamorize such things as wealth, materialism, sex, violence, and anything-goes lifestyles, some young viewers are unwittingly inculcated with the idea that what they see is what they are owed, when it is they who owe — they who must prepare to pay, by becoming productive members of society. Otherwise, they may join the ever-enlarging legions of lazy leeches lounging in the lap of government dole, watching the wasteland.