An important – and disturbing – PSA. As they say, “the more you know…”

Seth Godin had a great post the other day about “Breaking News:” the habit of news agencies to make every run-of-the-mill story “breaking” in order to goose their ratings. He writes:

National Review has an enlightening article about one of the most addictive and destructive drugs in the world: pornography. It is probably the most destructive force against marriages today.

What is not mentioned, however, is that most mainstream TV and movies are now the gateway drugs for this evil.

One of the very few non-Christian, non-baseball blogs I follow is Seth Godin’s. He is a marketing expert who writes about productivity in the business world (and in all of life) and other related topics. He recently had a post titled But it’s better than TV that I really appreciated:

At the local health food store lunch buffet, they offer stir fried tempeh.

I never get it. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are always so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.

That’s why I don’t watch TV. At all. There are so many other things I’d rather do in that moment.

Broadcast TV was a great choice when a> there weren’t a lot of other options and b> when everyone else was watching the same thing, so you needed to see it to be educated.

Now, though, you could:

• Run a little store on eBay
• Write a daily blog
• Write a novel
• Start an online community about your favorite passion
• Go to meetups in your town
• Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
• Learn a new language, verbal or programming
• Write hand written thank you notes each evening to people who helped you out or did a good job
• Produce small films and publish them online
• Listen to the one thousand most important operas
• Read a book or two every evening
• Play a game a Scrabble with your family

None of them are perfect. Each of them are better than TV.

And of course, as Catholics, we could add many more to this list:

• Go to Adoration
• Pray the Rosary
• Help in a soup kitchen
• Visit your neighbor

And the list could go on and on…

I have always been a sports fan, and growing up, I watched just about every major game played in Major League Baseball, college basketball, the NFL and the NBA. After getting married, I didn’t watch quite as many games, but continued to intermittently follow the different leagues and also added golf to my viewing habits. But now that I lack a TV, I only watch Major League Baseball (really, only the Reds) over the Internet.

However, when I initially got rid of my TV in late 2007, I quickly came upon a quandary: how was I going to watch the Super Bowl? My wife had no interest in the game, so we couldn’t really go to a Super Bowl party, and I wasn’t going to leave my family just to watch a game I didn’t care that much about, so in the end I missed the game. I admit: it felt a little weird as it seems as if EVERYONE watches the Super Bowl and that it is practically a national obligation. However, I didn’t really feel like I had missed anything that important and when the Super Bowl came around last year, I barely noticed it. This year the same holds true.

What I discovered, however, is how many people do NOT watch the Super Bowl. You would think that almost 100% of all Americans watch it, but in fact less than half watch even a few minutes of it, and only about a third of Americans view it at any one time on average. So actually more people do NOT watch it than do watch it, and they all seem to go about their lives just fine.

So if you are planning on watching the Super Bowl, enjoy the game! But if you have no plans to see it, do not feel alone – you are actually in the majority.

Speaking of being counter-cultural and killing your TV, a reader writes in to tell the beautiful results of living such a life:

We killed our tv 30 yrs ago when our youngest was 3 yrs old. We spent our evenings reading 1) lives of the saints 2) good secular literature such as the Chronicles of Narnia 3 and memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. We had a prayerful, peaceful, joyful home with NO rebellion whatever when the kids reached their teens. They NEVER asked why they had to go to Mass.  At ages 32 and 30 they are fervent Catholics and my daughter is a contemplative nun.

Aside from that, killing the tv was the best financial decision we made.  The kids’ attention span was not being constantly being fractured,and the people who tested them for the school district (two years apart) both remarked on their extraordinary attention span.  They both did very well in school.  My daughter was an A student for the 16 yrs of her schooling and they both got a lot of scholarship help on a merit basis.  In fact, my daughter was a National Merit Scholar. None of the above would have happened with a TV. Our home was very conducive to study without it. It paid off.

It drives me to distraction to hear parents worry about “the culture” as they are walking out the door to drive over to Best Buy to buy a still bigger entertainment center to import the dreaded culture into their own home and into the hearts and minds of their children.

It also drives me to distraction to hear all the talk about the “vocations crisis.”  There is no vocations crisis.  There is a parenting crisis.  There is a leadership crisis.  When priests and bishops kill their own tvs, and can persuade even as little as 5% of their young parents to do the same, within 15 to 20 yrs they would have more priests and religious than they would know what to do with- especially if they pointed them in the direction of the lives of the saints, the Baltimore Catechism and family evenings together.

I got an interesting question recently:

Hello,

I am frustrated in my attempts to grow in holiness, and I was hoping you could help me out.

For some reason, I feel that I have stagnated in my spiritual growth and can’t seem to figure out why. I go to Mass almost every day, pray the Rosary regularly, and try to make time for reading the Scriptures on a regular basis. I also perform works of charity and volunteer at my parish as much as I am able. I try my best to follow the 10 Commandments and go to confession at least monthly. Also, most nights I invite some entertainers into my house whose performances oftentimes include taking off all their clothes and simulating having sexual relations.

Can you give me any advice on what I am doing wrong? What can I do to move forward in the path of holiness?

Okay, I admit it: I made this question up. I did it to highlight what I think is a serious problem among many practicing Catholics today: watching movies and television shows with sex and nudity without any realization of how horrible they are to the spiritual life. Even many Catholics who are aware of the dangers of pornography on the Internet don’t think twice about watching “mainstream” movies and TV shows which include gratuitous scenes of sex and nudity (and the amount of sexual content in movies and on TV is only increasing).

The problem is desensitization: we have become so used to what passes for acceptable in our culture that our own bar of acceptability has adjusted as well. If a movie has a great plot, good production values, is well-received by critics, and has but a single sex scene, how many of us would refuse to watch the movie for that one scene? But if the scenario I mentioned above actually happened – live performers came into your house and simulated having sexual relations – would you not be shocked and extremely offended?

So why allow it when it happens in a box in your living room?

In 1939, David Sarnoff, the president of what would soon be NBC, presented TV to the world with these words:

“It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in the troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of all mankind.”

I don’t think this is what he had in mind.

I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “Kill your TV”. It now looks like if you take my advice, you can claim self-defense.

Today is the last day that TV stations will be broadcasting an analog signal. It took about 10 years for the government to organize and plan this changeover, but there are still concerns from top officials:

“In any change this big, there are going to be disruptions,” said Michael Copps, the Federal Communications Commission acting chairman. “We are trying our best to provide people, especially those who are most at-risk, with the help they need to make the switch as smoothly as possible. And we’re going to keep offering it after June 12, so people should call us at 1-888-CALL-FCC.”

“At-risk” – from what, no TV? They are acting like people’s feeding tubes are about to be switched off (actually, based on the Terri Schiavo case, that would cause less concern from government officials). And frankly, in many ways, TV has become the nation’s feeding tube – providing mental sustenance for the past 50 years to all ages. Unfortunately, that “sustenance” is the equivalent of junk food, and most people don’t know that there is a world of gourmet mental food out there if they just pull the plug on their TV. Of course, supporting the junk food of TV is conducive to good governement: a mentally weak people is an easily controlled people (read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley for details).

A recent poll showed that only 52% of Americans believe that TV is a necessity. I say “only” because this is the lowest number since the question was first asked 35 years ago. I also say “only” because I don’t believe the number is accurate.

Watching TV is like taking a nap: most people love doing it, but few admit that fact publicly. (For the record: I LOVE taking naps). Most studies have shown that the average American watches hours of TV a day, but I’ve yet to meet the person who admits to watching more than about an hour in a day. I know that when I was a big TV viewer I usually didn’t realize how long I was camped out in front of the boob tube – that device has the ability to warp the space-time continuum, turning “a half hour” into 2 hours. When I got rid of our TV, I literally felt like I had more hours in my day.

(I also wonder how much the drop in the poll is due to other ways of accessing entertainment. I don’t own a TV, but I can watch just about all the latest shows on the Internet if I wanted – heck, you can even watch many of them on an iPhone! It might be that people – especially young people – have just transferred their viewing to another screen.)

Growing up in the 80’s, I definitely was a TV child. My brother and I had a TV in our room and I remember many nights of pushing a towel under the door to prevent my parents from seeing the glow of the TV being watched past our bedtime. I can still tell you the Thursday night comedy lineup on NBC in the late 80’s: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court (my personal favorite was Night Court). Watching TV came as natural to me as eating or sleeping.

So why do I consider my decision last year to chuck my TV out the window one of the best I’ve ever made? A few reasons:

1) Poor Quality. Let’s be honest: the vast, vast majority of stuff put on the airwaves is junk. It seems like the more channels are created, the less quality work is produced. I mean, really, is “How I Met Your Mother” the best our creative elite can produce?

2) Immorality as the norm. We all know that Hollywood has a different moral standard than the Church. For years this standard was largely suppressed from public display, but now immorality is considered the norm. How many new shows are put out that do NOT have the requisite homosexual character?

3) Materialism run amok. It was the commercials that finally put me over the edge. Because of reasons (1) and (2) I had been reduced to watching only sporting events, but even those became unbearable due to the incessant marketing of crap as “necessary” to improve my life. We have spent ourselves into bankruptcy, both on the national and individual level, yet no one seems to realize that this is exactly what we’ve been told to do every 7 minutes on the boob tube.

4) Better sources of information. It used to be that watching the news on both NBC and CBS was considered “diverse sources of information”. Those days are long gone, and thank God for that. Now one can stay abreast of current events without even knowing who the network anchors are (who are they, anyway?). And the sources of information are so much more diverse that one can be more assured of accurate reporting.

5) TV is not a book. ‘Nuff said.

What has been amazing is that now that I am not consuming so much entertainment, I find I can produce much more in my own life – work, writing, time with my family, etc. Man was not created to simply devour images from an electronic box, but to actively engage the world he was created in.

This lent, consider giving up TV – it will be the best “sacrifice” you’ll ever make!