Television: The Plug-In Drug

Marie Winn, in her essay “Television: The Plug-In Drug” writes about the history of the television and its effects on families since it was introduced to our homes. She conveys that the television was initially seen as a great benefit to families by bringing them closer together. However, as society and television evolved it started becoming more and more obvious that the television was driving families to opposite ends of the home rather than gathering them together on the sofa. Now, families are hooked on a drug they can’t kick, because it allows them to avoid their problems and sometimes create new ones.

“Kill Your Television”. You’ve all seen the bumper sticker. Today, killing your television may actually be possible. Your television promises glimpses into reality by allowing you to watching people live in a house with strangers, or by watching people trying to survive on an island with nothing but their cunning to keep them alive (except for the crazy obstacle course in the jungle that can save them for another day). You can also take your TV with you wherever you go through the miracle of mobile phones. Have to go to work? Not a problem. Just pull out your phone and watch today’s edition of One Life to Live in the comfort of your cubicle. Television has become an almost living and breathing organism that is such a part of all of our daily lives that it has become another member of our families. Rather than slaying the TV beast, people and families are being murdered in their living rooms.

The television is such an integral part of American family life that it would be a miracle to think about the American family without it. The average American’s need for TV is almost staggering. Winn writes, “the medium has become so deeply ingrained in daily life that in many states the TV set has attained the range of a legal necessity, safe from repossession in case of debt along with the clothes and cooking utensils” (457). Is this scary to anyone else? Clothing could keep you alive if you were trapped in the woods eating bugs and tree branches. I could understand the need for cooking utensils as a necessity because in order to eat, some kind of utensils are needed, but the TV, why the TV? It just doesn’t even sound right. Clothes, check. Cooking utensils, check. TV, oh thank God they didn’t take that, check! We have become so reliant on it as if it was our life support and it was the only thing keeping us alive. Without the nightly news we’d never know what was going on, without the Daily Show we’d never laugh. One would never think about picking up a book or newspaper to learn about something. The fine art of trying is a thing of the past. All we have to do is hit the power button and use our thumb. We can claim that we’re learning or investing in something important but if asked about what we watched the night before, many of us would fail to remember. It wasn’t because it wasn’t interesting or we didn’t learn something but because there was no effort involved.

What is on TV isn’t even necessarily important to us anymore, especially our kids, they just need the security of the noise coming from the big black box. Maybe their parents don’t listen to them when they try and share or maybe their parents aren’t even around. Parents know that the TV is always there for the child if they can’t be. Winn writes, “They (kids) watch their favorite programs, and when there is “nothing much on I really like,” they watch whatever else is on – because watching is the important thing” (460). Barney cares about the child. You know the song, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family”. Why wouldn’t a child want to be part of that. Without the white noise coming from the other room, parents might actually have to raise the kids themselves. It’s ok though, if the program that makes them feel the most comfortable isn’t on, it doesn’t matter; they can watch an infomercial with Billy Mays and be enraptured with how interested he is in their needs and interests.

Kids aren’t the only ones that rely on Television for an escape though. Adults are just as guilty as using TV as a coping mechanism. TV has made it so easy for parents to just plop the kids down in front of it and go about their lives without the demands of the pesky kids running around. Winn describes a scene of the kids watching the TV while a couple enjoy a peaceful meal together, “surely the needs of the adults in that family were being better met than the needs of the children. The kids were effectively shunted away and rendered untroublesome, while their parents enjoyed a life as undemanding as that of any childless couple” (460).We’ve all seen the mother ignoring her child as she continues a conversation with another adult, totally unaware that little Billy is about to jump out of the shopping cart and land on his head. Parents can be totally unaware of the fact they have children and then when they realize that they have a child and have to care for it, it ticks them off. It’s almost as if they had nothing to with the child coming into existence, it just showed up in their house one day and now they’re really annoyed that they have to deal with it. The child is yours! Billy needs parents to love him and actually care about him. What if parents didn’t have a TV to babysit their kids? What if parents realized that the moment they became parents their goals in life changed forever. Their job became raising up the child to contribute to society, to respect others, and to learn about hard work. Are the parents exhibiting these traits by sitting the kids down in front of the TV while they enjoy a nice meal together? No, they’re taking the easy way and only thinking about their own well being and happiness and ignoring the child’s needs and desires.

Human nature is lazy and selfish. We are all like this. Paint us all with the same brush, there is no escaping ourselves. This laziness and selfishness becomes very evident in a family situation where things outside of the home have caused additional stress such as divorce, job loss or financial troubles. When the Television is added to this fragile situation the effects can be frightening. Winn writes, “the medium’s dominant role in the family serves to anesthetize parents into accepting their family’s diminished state and prevents them from struggling to regain some of the richness the family once possessed” (465). It is the role of the parents to pursue the kids and draw them out, and not be drawn to the one thing that may be causing all the damage in the first place. Parenting is a responsibility that a lot of parents don’t understand and shift that responsibility over to a black box. Dad used to come home and want to play with the kids and tell them what he did that day. He longed to visit with his wife and see what her day was like. Unfortunately, now he just comes home and plops himself down in front of the TV and zones out. It wasn’t always like this. The kids felt the richness of being in a family that loved each other, a richness that couldn’t have been replaced with anything. As Dad started to model to his kids what relaxing and comfort looked like, they began to pursue the same outlets and eventually the whole family got hooked.

The selfishness and laziness that we all have breeds a state of unconsciousness in a family. Life goes by outside the window while we get distracted by the next “Biggest Loser”. Parents become unaware that the TV is doing their job and kids are unaware that they are worshiping a plugged in piece of electronics. What we worship takes our time, and our money. Americans spend more on TVs than most people in third world countries make in a year. Then once we get the perfect TV, we sit and stare at it like we’re waiting for it to ask us how our day was. Winn writes, “In spite of everything, the American family muddles on, dimly aware that something is amiss but distracted from an understanding of its plight by an endless stream of television images” (465). Images come to mind of Alex from the film A Clockwork Orange sitting in front of all those disturbing images with his eye lids pried open, unable to close them. The only difference being that he didn’t want to be there, we however willingly subject ourselves to the influx of millions of images every week. We crave watching people hurt themselves; we crave other people’s misfortunes. The happy ending will someday be replaced by the divorce and splitting up of the assets. Kids need parents though. Parents who care enough about them to not let the TV raise them, no matter how educational the program is. Nothing can replace the interaction between a parent and child if done in love. Parents are real people. An actor on Sesame Street doesn’t know your child’s problems or what they learned in school that day. A parent can ask specific questions and find out what makes their child special and different from any other child. They can learn to love that child for who he or she is. To a TV program, a child is just a customer that they’re trying to please, and they’ll do almost anything to get the child hooked.

What is the Television turning families into and what will become of the family in the years to come? Kids come home, grab something to eat from the refrigerator, sit down on the couch or their bed and turn on TV for the next couple of hours. Parents get home, yell at the kids for not doing their homework, and tell them to come get their dinner before it gets cold. They take it back to their rooms, pretend to do their homework and fall asleep. This cycle is endless. What if the TV wasn’t the most important household appliance in the house? Imagine a child coming home from school, ignoring his homework to play outside with all the other kids whose parent’s decided the TV was tearing their families apart and got rid of it. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon because we and our future generations are hooked on a drug that there isn’t a support group for. A drug that feels better than any hallucinogenic or upper, it’s a drug that knows us, speaks to us, and numbs us while the outside world just floats by.

Put Your Pants On

Where’s your pants? Why are you just sitting there? Your baby is crying, your wife needs help with the dishes. Put down that porn magazine, turn off your Xbox and put your pants on, please, your family is depending on you, society is depending on you, we’re all depending on you to be the man you’re supposed to be. You might be asking yourself, “What does it mean to be a man?” Dictionaries define a man as someone who is an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or a woman. “Well, that’s me” you say. Wrong, boys run around in their underwear, playing video games and have a mommy and a boy is what you are. Don’t worry though, you’re not alone, there are millions of “men” just like you, sitting at home while their wife works her two jobs, too lazy to get a job and provide for your family, sucking on the teet of society. Thank God Obama got elected, now you can get your stimulus check and buy some more video games. Go ahead and stimulate that economy!
Men are like trucks. We need a weight on our shoulders to feel important and to drive straight. Without that load we’re all squirrely and stop at every rest stop along the way. Whether it be the strip club, the hot chick walking down the street, or the hottest new video game since World of Warcraft, we are easily distracted from what we’re supposed to be doing. That weight is ours and we’re not supposed to transfer that weight to our wives and kids. They need us, they want us to lead them. If you are not providing for your family financially and emotionally you’re not only failing them but society also.
A woman gets up at 6am, gets ready for work, cooks breakfast for her husband and the kids. A beautiful picture of a home right? What I didn’t tell you is that her husband is still asleep on the couch from a long night of Halo 3. Why does she have to do this? Why is she providing the physical, emotional and financial needs for the whole family, including the husband? Why is she compensating for his laziness? This is killing the family. The kids might have a great time with Dad but its only because he knows how to play all their favorite video games. When they need someone to have a serious conversation with, they immediately go to Mom because she’s got her head on straight and a certain amount of wisdom that they don’t pickup from the Dad. They can’t respect him if he’s just on older child. They need someone to be a Dad. Someone that works hard, shows them the right way to live and teaches them what it means to be a respectful adult. Unfortunately, he’s wasted it because he’s just another kid for the wife to take care of.
Or maybe the husband has a job but the wife works too. They both go to work early and come home late. The kids never see them because they drop them off at daycare all day. Trying to keep up with the Jones’, this is just the way it has to be. Times are tough, and they need the extra money. Unfortunately, if the wife isn’t pulling in $30-50k a year, they aren’t making any extra money at all. When daycare, work clothing, car expenses, and taxes all get factored in, things start to add up. Maybe the husband should get a second job and have the wife stay home and raise the kids, because this is often overlooked as an important job in itself. Who better to raise them than the woman who birthed them? The weight of providing financially should be on his shoulders not hers, he needs the weight to drive straight.
Marriages and home life haven’t always been like this. Men used to be the sole provider for their families. They used to go to work all day, come home and play with the kids, have dinner with the family and actually care about what their wife did during the day. They longed to spend time with their wives because they loved them and didn’t see them as an asset to be exploited. What happened? Why isn’t this the case anymore? The history of dating can help to shed some light on what caused men to stop and women to start providing for their families. The typical date nowadays starts by the man picking up the woman in his car from her place or maybe even her parent’s place. Then they head out to dinner, where he lets her pay her half of the bill. Then go to a movie, where she buys her own popcorn and soda. Why does she have to pay for anything? This pattern starts on the first date and continues throughout the relationship. The term “date” was a term prostitutes used for their “hook ups”. Instead of dating, couples used to court each other. The boy would go to the girls’ house, have dinner with the family and that’s it. This would continue until the parents agreed that the boy was suitable for their daughter. Then the car was invented. Boys could take the girl out, buy them dinner and go to movies. After dinner and a movie, the woman often felt obligated to give sex in return for the entertainment. How is that unlike prostitution? Sex in exchange for goods. The women start paying their way so they don’t owe the men anything. Men weren’t under the supervision of parents so they felt entitled to do whatever they wanted to or with the girls, whether it be rape, abuse, or just a little demeaning of the woman, men thought they deserved something and would do whatever they wanted to get what the wanted. In response, the women’s movement started gaining steam to protect women from this gross mistreatment and to give them equal rights as the men. Women are indeed equal to men and if the men had treated them as women instead of pets that they could do whatever they wanted to with, a lot of the women’s movement would have been unnecessary. The women’s movement has come far, unfortunately, men are still looking for an easy lay and a nice piece of meat for their arm, driving the man and woman further apart.
Where would we be today if all men were hard working dudes. If a man woke up before his whole family, worked hard all day and came home to play with his kids and love his wife, we wouldn’t face nearly as many welfare situations, kids wouldn’t grow up as part of the system but rather as part of a family where they knew they were loved and could respect their father rather than wish he wasn’t alive. These kids are our future. We have to pour into them. It’s not that a mother is incapable of working but that a father is more respectable when he is. If a man can’t be respected by his own family, what benefit can he be to society?
In society today there is so much emphasis on our future. You’ll hear things like “go green”, “reduce your carbon footprint” or “we can’t let our future generations inherit our mess”. All these things are true and we must act and act now but not by supporting companies that are carbon neutral but by giving children Dads who work hard at their jobs, can’t wait to come home and play with them, and who look to serve their wives above the call of duty. These traits have to be passed on to our children or they are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Doomed to mistake boys for men. Men should be distinguishable from boys, they should be the men their families need. So men, please, take off the sweats and put on some pants with a zipper.