How Television stole your family from your family.

How Television stole your family from your family.

By Lloyd Hart

In many respects television stole your family by proposing alternate almost ideal families or nuclear families for broad consumption, but first television had to get you to watch it. This wasn't that difficult to do as there were already incredible amounts of almost vaudevillian levels of entertainment and current events everywhere to be had just from film.

Film was ironically a fantastic entertainment and propaganda tool for business and government prior to the invention of television but film could only steal your family maybe once or twice a week. Whereas television could steal your family every night.

I was first alerted to this by a friend of my brother's who pointed out to me, when I was still young, about how television had completely diverted his family's attention away from his family. They were of course diverted by supposed ideal and not so ideal families portrayed in sitcoms and dramas on TV. By government and corporate spin on current events and dazzling displays of consumer products people would begin to jealously covet. This fellow's family literally stopped talking to each other on an intimate familia level and almost became complete strangers to one another, only really communicating in basic needs functioning language and then spending years trying to communicate with each other through television produced cliches.

Governments and corporations seemed to be using George Orwell's 1984 as a handbook just as they used Einstein's theory of relativity to build the Atomic Bomb. Television became the most efficient means to advertise a product line as well as propaganda line.

Television to this day has not given up it's status even with what I call the unconscious desire for intimate human interaction through the cathode ray tube that produced the personal computer and then the internet. However Television is still keeping people watching with movie channels, live sporting events and 24 hour news channels examining stories far beyond anything anyone would desire in order to be informed. But with the personal computer and the advent of the Internet people found that they had a way to interact with the cathode ray tube that had a magical ability to capture their attention and turn them into what people would call zombies. This magical ability was actually not so magical but actually a side effect of the radiation emanating from the cathode ray tube. The beam from the cathode ray tube actually caused people to enter an alpha state of mind however not a complete Alpha state where a human ends up dreaming but a kind of 1 foot in Alpha 1 foot out. Thus the seemingly zombie state of mind when the person would walk into a room filled with people watching a television program and seeing that they weren't in the least bit distracted by the entrance of a person.

With the introduction of the personal computer and the Internet creating full-scale interaction through the cathode ray tube into a network where other people were connected seemed to keep the distraction going for quite some time. Of course business and government benefited greatly from this ability to network instantaneously through the production of emails and web sites long before the rest of us could but you can imagine seeing an entire generation of people staring into cathode ray tubes that were now literally within a few feet of their heads and no longer at the other end of the room from the couch sharing all their personal information with the NSA. So instead of getting up and yelling at the TV, at a politician or at a sporting event error or foul or bad call, people could now write emails and send them somewhere with their gripes digitally encapsulated and NSA captured but all the while familia alienation being maintained. Millions upon millions of people watching the news over the last 14 years were literally jumping up from the television and running to their computers to see if there was any alternate information on what world leaders were saying about the US invasion of Afghanistan or the US invasion of Iraq or WMDs or torture. All the while still being distracted from intimate Familia interaction.

Now with smart phones and texting people are walking around looking down unconsciously seeking intimate familia interaction through a device in their hands blindly walking in front of on coming buses or running over and killing others while texting or screaming into their cell phones abusing one's self and others not really knowing that one is really seeking intimate familia interaction that they have been cut off from since childhood when we were all plunked down in front of the electronic baby sitter, the T.V...

In the end the only way to recapture that feeling of belonging to a family and gaining intimate Familia interaction is to turn off your television, turn off your Internet connection, and turn off your "smart" phones and simply have an ordinary conversation with your friends and family. It will literally require all of us recognizing that these electronic tools are just that, tools and nothing else.

We must break our messianic obsessive disorder with these devices and television. In these very hard times imposed on us from on high, we must come to terms with the fact that the revolution will not begin on facebook, or on twitter or on the internet or on television. It will begin where it always has, in the empty stomachs of our families.