Modern Austerity Rant: Turn off your damn TVs.

Many people I know spend a great deal of time watching television, until I was in my later 20’s I would have fit this category too. In fact in my youth I probably watched more TV than anyone. There was no restriction on my viewing habits, no commands to complete homework. If I wanted to I could watch TV well into the night, and I often did.

Maybe that’s why I don’t even keep a TV plugged in anymore. I haven’t had cable in more than a decade, except for the time Shaw tired to hook me in with a three month trial. I know there are good shows in the world I’m missing, and spectacular news footage that will have people buzzing at the water cooler for days. I am far removed from the celebrity break-ups and make-ups, distant from the latest reality show results and probably considered a by freak most of my urban contemporaries; but frankly, I don’t mind.

After a while you forget what it’s like to need that thing in your life. Of course you never real forget about it, it is omnipresent in our society, and there are important NHL playoffs going on every spring to jog one’s memory.

In the end it’s kind of like giving up smoking, another vice I have been lucky to have the fortitude to overcome. At first all you think about is that thing. It’s everywhere you look, and all your friends are still indulging. You start to obsess: what will happen in all the serials you’ve abandoned? What peril awaits at Season Finale? And all those glitzy music and film awards, the documentaries, the nature shows, Pop-Up Video...

But when you’re no longer shaking and sweating, when the last of the shooting pains has ceased, you find a little space in the world that’s not explicitly trying to sell you something. A place where you don’t need constant injections of entertainment to wash away the dull and mundane.

People have always enjoyed entertainment; history is full of examples of fulfilling this basic human need. The Roman Coliseum stands testament to it, so too does Kabuki theatre and classical music. But never in history has man had so much time to percolate. To just sit around, long after the sun has gone down, bathed in electric light and utterly bored.

The television would appear to be a near ideal solution to this dilemma, and it’s popularity since the 1950’s is ample evidence. It has linked us to events around the globe, brought directly to our living rooms by some cheerful and heavily made-up Ken or Barbie with a clip-on mike. By way of compromise we need only suffer a few zillion ads and oblique product placements, sometimes cleverly hidden within the news as reports.

On the negative side TV tends to make people a lot stupider. The proliferation of tabloid news programming and celebrity worship rags on the newsstand is just the tip of the iceberg. A closer look reveals people who believe what they see (even in this age of image manipulation), who view the value of things cleverly advertised as status items as self-evident. People who’s opinion about the world is shaped by a Ken or Barbie journalist that is really just the mouthpiece of a sour old fart who doesn’t believe in anything.

Certainly this is not the case for everyone, and there were probably a lot of easily manipulated sorts in the golden age of radio and beyond. But seeing is believing, and critical thinking is no longer in vogue.

Most people I know are figuring out ways to get their hands on bigger and skinnier idiot boxes, rather than admitting they have a problem. And I suppose it’s a bit hypocritical of me, the ex-TV junky to preach austerity. But it’s a bit like the ex-smoker being the loudest voice in the room when someone lights up.

My mom used to embarrass me when she became an ex-smoker in the 80’s, making a big stink over someone else’s stinky butt. Now I get it, and I’m not afraid to say it: Turn off your damn TVs.