Taking the Tube Underground
Anne Marie Waters on Removing the Television from the Family Hearth
Mom, there is something I want to tell you.” My usually thoughtful, and occasionally lucid, little boy waited dramatically with a grave expression on his pink, sweaty five-year-old face as I unpacked the recently delivered moving boxes. Jack had been playing outside in the August heat and meeting the other young residents of our new neighborhood.
“It’s something I’ve noticed, about us, that is different from the other kids,” he said somberly. Here goes, I thought. We homeschool. We say grace. We go to church. Well, it was bound to come up sometime. “Mom, everyone else has their TV on the main level in the family room. And, mom,” he paused once more for effect, “ours is in the basement.”
His Strange Family
Now, just so this is clear, our basement is finished, like a den, with carpet, air conditioning, a sofa, etc. We’d certainly never want to see our precious babes forced to watch their Bob the Builder and Monsters, Inc. DVDs in anything less than stereo sound on leather furniture.
We’d not committed the heresy of relegating the television to the garage or, worse yet, the trash pile. But apparently even removing it from the place of prominence once held by the family hearth made my kindergartener aware that his family was an anomaly, strangers in a strange land, in the world but not of it.
Since the inception of “National Turn Off the TV Week” in April, I have read more than a few articles by individuals who took the “challenge” to unplug the tube for seven days and were thrilled with the effects on their home life. Other friends have kept the TV off for a full month and attested to its blessing on their marriages, sleep patterns, productivity, and spiritual life.
To hear some of these testimonials, one might think they’d be crazy to go back to watching hours of television every day, given the benefits of watching no TV. But to a man, each of these testimonials has ended with the admission that such divine bliss as experienced by cutting off the television “has to end sometime.” You can almost hear the wistful sighs.
But why—why must we bring back the TV? Are we really so enslaved to the TV that we can’t envision life without its daily numbing effects? Or are our lives so dull or hopeless that we must spend every evening vicariously living through TV characters?
I still remember the arguments my husband and I had early in our marriage when money was so tight. Every month, when we wrote the check to the cable company, he’d suggest canceling our service. It was $41 a month, but to cut cable in our area of the country meant cutting not only the cable news to which we political junkies had become addicted for hours a night, but also all network TV reception.
This, I could not imagine. I actually started to panic and had to scramble for my asthma inhaler to continue normal breathing.
Anne Marie Waters is a freelance writer and former associate editor of The Campaign Insider, a trade publication for political consultants. She and her husband recently moved from Washington, D.C., to Birmingham, Alabama, with their three boys. They attend St. Matthew's Anglican Church.
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