The Story of Television: Sowing and Reaping


Galatians 6:7

Don't be misled--you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant.

I have been watching a great deal of television recently due to my recuperation, some of it willingly, some of it forced upon me by my hospital roomie. I have come to a conclusion, or more appropriately, it has further confirmed by conclusions about television.

Let me make an analogy. Television is like a piece of meat that has a lot of parts that have gone bad and rotten. There are pieces that are still healthy and nutritious. One has to bear the cutting knife carefully to slice the good from the bad. If one needed a general action that would be safest, it would be to put the tv on the curb to be picked up like the garbage most of it is. However, I think, it is possible to have a television and maintain a level of purity in our watching yet it requires a lot of intentionality. Just trolling through the channels typically is like dredging from a lake. Expect a lot of mud and more often than not, it is easy to  get dirty.

Despite right-wing idealogues on public television and the attempts to defund it, public television and other public access television stations like C-Span promise the best programs. It always confounds me that right-wingers love Fox but somehow seem blissfully unaware that Fox Television cut out it niche in the non-news division of being more risque and violent than the already established mainstream television networks. Seriously, God is not mocked by such duplicity. Conservatives are just being duped as a market-share and Fox execs count that the ditto-heads lack the authenticity and integrity to make the connection.  Defund that.

The charter of public television and other of these stations is educational and not merely entertainment. Entertainment can devolve into insipid immorality, the image, and the inane. In the hospital room, I started to watch Sesame Street to counter my roomate's television selections. It was kind of funny and sad, Sesame Street designed for children was vastly more intelligent and thoughtful than what he was watching. Kind of like an Adult Bookstore being grossly more infantile than the children's section of the local bookstore. One is morally retarded, the other is age-appropriate educational material that often practices great storytelling, creative illustrations, and a moral.

We have to be careful about what we plant in our mind, for it is a field where both good and bad will grow.  

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