It's the Devil in Me....

Tom what you wrote has struck a cord with me; my very being is resonating with an unwholesome, and disgustingly self-righteous desire to tell you that you have succumbed to the ultimate evil. As I read your last post I became increasingly aware of a feeling of complete and utter repulsion. I honestly would rather you had written about some sort of porn addition or come clean about a dastardly crime you had committed than hear you talking in such blasé fashion about the sickness that is ripping apart the very fabric of western civilisation. I refer, of course, to Television.

As a brief illustration let me recount for you a situation that I have found myself in time and time again of late. It was a Tuesday night about a week ago when I received a phone call from a friend, who for the purposes of this example shall be called Bob, inviting me round to his house. I was informed there would be several others around there whom I would know and I wrongly assumed I was in for a pleasant evening. Upon arriving at the address I entered the lounge and realised, to my horror, that I had been lured into a trap.
Let me recount the scene for you: my first thought was that everyone must have been eagerly awaiting my arrival, for they were all sitting in a semicircle, eyes wide with anticipation looking in my direction (not an unusual response when I’m entering a room). I, head swelling with importance, made some pleasant greeting which was met, to my surprise, with grunts and vague nods in my direction. It was at this point I realised something was horribly wrong. These people were not looking at me at all; they were of course glued to the television which sat in the corner happily soaking up the attention that was rightfully mine. I sat down disconsolately and began to watch the garbage that spewed forth from the black box all the while thinking, ‘I could just as very well stayed at home, saved myself the petrol and actually done something worth while with my evening’. Such thoughts were occasionally punctuated with, ‘I’m going to bloody kill that bloody Bob.’ Eventually the programs of ‘interest’ were over and the TV was finally turned off. Instead of bursting forth into fantastic and scintillating conversation we just sat there stunned, mumbling pathetic excuses for why we suddenly all felt so awkward. Then muttering things like ‘oh I’m so tired’ and ‘is that really the time’, people began to leave.

I wanted to shout at everyone: Is that it? Is that what this little group of friends is all about? Is this the sum total of our relationships these days? Did we just meet up to watch tele together? When I go around somewhere I want to talk to my friends, find out how they actually are, hear about how Bob’s mother just got diagnosed with cancer, how Kathy’s cat just had kittens or about the most beautiful girl that Jim ever saw at the dairy. I don’t bloody care about some fictional family in America, or some overweight bachelor in London; what I care about are my friends, joi de vivre – the joy of living, the very stuff of life! Television is robbing us of some of the most precious times of our lives, times when we could be creating memories that will stay with us until we die. No one is ever going to say in 10 years time, ‘hey remember the time we sat round at Bob’s and watched the 13th episode of the 2nd series of Malcolm in the Middle?’. Television is robbing us of our goodness and love, it’s sucking the very soul out of great friendships, it’s making us so lazy that we forget how to talk to each other, it soaks up hours and hours of our time and all the while it’s filling us with materialism, lust, greed and any other form of vice I could care to mention.

As I got back in to the cold vinyl seats of my car I could just imagine the little black boxes in homes the world over, all smiling smugly, congratulating themselves on a job well done.