Kill Your Television

Don't you love asshats who are always ranting about how they "don't own (or ever watch) a TV" as if they are somehow better than the rest of us idiots? It reminds me of hostile vegetarians. Not that I advocate planning your life by the TV Guide, but people should be able to do what they want. Here is a snippet from a funny article in Reason on the same topic-

"But we have plenty of reasons to doubt that bill of indictment on television. Children today are watching slightly less television per day than they were a decade ago, even as they continue to pork up. Violent crime rates have been falling in the United States for a decade; and rates of teen sexual activity and pregnancy have fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s. Average IQs have been soaring along with TV viewing for decades.
And it's not as though Americans have been sitting in front of their boob tubes and drooling all day for the past half-century of mass TV viewing. Our real gross domestic product has more than quintupled since 1950.
A lot of anti-TV attitudes are based in mere differences of opinion over what qualifies as a judicious use of one's free time. Critics are constantly hectoring viewers to wrench their eyes away from their flickering screens and get out and do something! Commentator Nina Buck offers a typical anti-TV screed, claiming that television "steals your life." Buck badgers couch potatoes: "Learn Italian! Take up underwater basket weaving, practice your circus act! Call your grandma, make dinner for your sweetheart, go salsa dancing, use pipe cleaners to make your hair look like Pippi Longstocking's!"
The suggestions are amusing (and I appreciate the tip on how to make my hair look like hair look like Pippi Longstocking's), but there is a solemn assumption behind them: that any activity will be less wasteful and more edifying than, for example, watching a good episode of The West Wing. It's not as though two or three generations ago people were sitting around discussing Kierkegaard and Kant with their children over the family dinner table every evening. In fact, most of them were fully engaged in the basic drudgery of earning a living or managing a household. The New York Times recently described a new survey that reported "what many Americans know but don't always admit, especially to social scientists: that watching TV is a very enjoyable way to pass the time, and that taking care of children—bless their young hearts—is often about as much fun as housework."
All of which is not to say that watching TV does not have some bad aspects—one can always get too much of a good thing—but it is hardly the instrument of mental, cultural, and moral degradation it is so often portrayed as. So feel free to wield that remote from time to time and just relax: There are few things more liberating than doing what you want with your time."