I’m turned off by turn your TV off week. The annual celebration which took place last week has me wondering why society consistently relegates my poor little TV to scapegoat proportions, assigning it blame for violence, the intellectual dimness of a generation of youth and America’s ever-growing (literally) fat problem. For years, I’ve let this Flicka Fear perpetuate itself by idly watching while TV gets a bad rep. I’ve even toyed with the notion of going TV-free, because I was brainwashed to believe I was a slave to the picture box. But today folks—well today, is a different day. Because if there is one thing those oh-so-violent television superheroes of my day have taught me, it’s that I’ve got to speak my mind and fight against the evil forces of TV hatred.
It is true that the telly displays a variety of images and messages that range from porn to pleasant, but at the end of the day, a TV is just a box of wires and dead electricity until we plug it in and give it meaning. What sense we apply to what show, and what strange dysfunctions we acquire from exposure to it is ultimately decided by our own accord. We become mindless drones when we stop acknowledging the satirical aspects of television, and instead thoughtlessly associate it with negativity without realizing that the stories being told are those that highlight our very own.
As a teenager, I remember an episode of Buffy being postponed because the subject matter dealt with a high school shooting. It was a week after the tragic shootings at Columbine had occurred, and though I understood that the episode was postponed out of respect for those victims, I quickly realized why television is so pertinent to our futures.
It speaks.
Loud and clear, it yells and screams what is deemed taboo and inappropriate, while allowing us the in to the troubled, ingenious and forgotten minds of the world. Canceling the Buffy episode that week may have halted the controversy, but the real outrage should have come from fans wanting to see the hour of television for the very reason that it depicted our society in its truth, with flaw and vulnerability.
We’re not a perfect world, so why should television present one? I’d rather be told the truth through television than a fluffy profanity-free Seventh Heaven lie of mass proportions.
As I am given to understand, the motivation to turn off the TV week is to return to the richness of our own realities. As TV tells it however, reality is just what we’re running from.
