The Lost Years

Photo byVictoria HeathonUnsplash

We didn’t own a television set until I was six years of age. I listened to records, played with toys, put puzzles together and was quite adept at keeping myself entertained. Like many in the sixties, we had a small black and white screen and one had to actually get up to change the channel. Our lives changed with its installation. The family gathered around it each evening instead of reading books or some other activity. We could count on one hand the number of channels and the stations went off at 11:00 pm when the voice came on saying, “Do you know where your children are?” Then the National Anthem played and the screen showed static until the following morning.

Even with its limited viewing, television quickly invaded our lives. We watched reruns of Leave it To Beaver and pretended to be magical like Samantha in Bewitched. After school was Lost in Space and The Patty Duke Show and the set stayed on until bedtime. Our days began to be planned around TV show schedules. One knew what day of the week it was according to what shows were on that evening. Friday night had a great family line-up with The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. My generation learned about family life, relationships, and how to interact with others and the world, at least in part, through watching these stories enacted on a screen being broadcasted to every home across America. Even advertisements impacted our lives. Many of us remember the Native American staring at garbage strewn along roads with a tear trickling down his cheek.

My brother never knew life without TV. As a child, his play revolved around a show he watched, while mine had been drawn from storybooks and life experiences. I recently signed up for Hulu and was immediately drawn to the old shows. Watching Family Affair, Green Acres, and That Girl caused feelings of nostalgia to surface, like eating one’s favorite comfort food. If TV had that much impact 50 years ago – what kind of impact does it and its progeny have on the youth of today?

My children had TV broadcasting 24/7 with close to a hundred channels. Several stations were targeted directly at very young children; i.e., Nick Jr., Disney, and Cartoon Network. My children grew up with computer games, some disguised as educational, video games, hand-held devices, big-screen TV’s, and a device in nearly every room of the home. We leased a car that had a screen in it to keep the young ones entertained. We had the Barney video collection for my son who loved the purple dinosaur and the entire Disney collection. We had Japanese anime’s and when DVDs came out, the collection expanded.

As parents we were admonished to control our children’s viewing, but we were surrounded like pioneers in covered wagons on old westerns. Both parents more often than not worked outside the home. Returning home exhausted, they were now supposed to monitor and control their child’s viewing and at the same time cook a nourishing family meal, supervise bath times, read to their children, have quality time and get ready for the next morning – all so the family could be up and out smoothly. More often than not the path of least resistance was allowing the children to watch TV.

My children are grown now and very much addicted to the screen. I do not believe our family is unusual. We even relate to one another based on our viewing preferences. Our antidotes often involve something seen on the screen. What is life now, but watching others’ pseudo lives and living vicariously through them? The television has become a drug to numb oneself to the world.

Television shows mirror our fears and mimic our dramas, entertaining us with others’ enfolding lives to spy upon. The World Wide Web has brought us closer to global consciousness, yet it restricts us by its mere clips of life. We do not see the entire picture or receive the whole story. Viewing life on a screen is a poor substitution for life experiences.

Excess of television viewing or anything with a flickering screen impacts our relationships. Many of us spend a large percentage of our time in front of one screen or another, electronic images invading our brains all hours of the day and night. There is so much already written about the negative impacts television and its descendants have had on our lives. “Less is best” accurately sums up views on the medium. It is addictive and compelling and so easy to use to rationalize frittering away time. Excuses in my own mind range from, “I am spending time with my children” to “I am so tired by the end of the day, I just want to zombie out.” And that is exactly what it is – zombie-ing out. The flickering images are so hypnotic as to be difficult to look away from, even to have a brief conversation with another. One can be so drawn into even the most mundane of tales. Because it is so hypnotic and addictive, we can be absorbed into mediocrity at best and a vegetative life at worst. Except vegetables grow best in the sunlight. Those addicted to flickering images spend much of their time in the dark without growth.

Entertainment is what much of our lives consists of: television, gaming, social media, internet surfing, movie watching, sports, even the “higher arts” of orchestras, bands, operas, ballet, theatre … There is absolutely nothing wrong with entertainment … in moderation and in right perspective. Placing the Eternal first in one’s life means entertainments must, if not lead to God, at least not place one in a position of blocking.