All of this was not a new disturbance. We have faced this before and it is sometimes hard for us to believe the utter unawareness of surrounding that our dear children suffer from. But they do, they are just children after all. They have not taken on the mantle of responsibility to mortgage and maintenance.
Something has to change though....for their sake. Because someday they will have these responsibilities of their own and it is our job to prepare them. What will it be this time? Another chart? Another schedule? I am not sure. Prayer and thought is needed here :).
I handed out fierce instructions to all 3 and then Anonimo and I escaped off to dinner together where we fumed and vented and immediately felt better. We felt even better after ice cream. Or did we just feel full? Too full.
We returned to a home that was happy to see us and a relaxing evening. We made the decision last year to get rid of our TV. I have enjoyed evenings ever since then....a sweet peace and quiet. A time to talk, study.....read.
One of my finds from the weekend rummage sale was the book One Man's Meat by EB White, the author of Charlotte's Web. This book was written in 1938 and is a journal of those next few years of his life. I was struck by the following passage:
The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper; for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television- of that I am quite sure.
EB White was exactly right....television in our homes has become an unbearable disturbance...our families and our country is and has been falling by it.
Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency and sound "effects" are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eyes range and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tab(loids), the mag(azines) and the movies it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every 24 will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images- distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light- these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another's face the impression will be of mere artifice. I like to dwell on this quaint time, when the solid world becomes make believe, McCarthy corporeal and Bergen stuffed, when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig [ a cricket or grasshopper.... ].Last week was National Turn off your TV week. I wonder how many people tried this and realized how much they preferred the things that seem to be over the things that are? When we gave up TV it was very hard.....very hard. Now that it is out of our lives I am thankful beyond belief....we focus more on the primary and not the secondary. We are no longer slaves to a grig-like schedule set by corporations that have nothing to do with our family. We set the schedule as to when we might watch a DVD on the computer.
I know that a TV free home is not for everyone....for us it brings that time for quiet that is sometimes so hard to come by in this frantic world where all around us grasshoppers and locusts devour the time.
Jeremiah 50:14
"Draw up your battle lines against Babylon on every side,
All you who bend the bow;
Shoot at her,
do not be sparing with your arrows,
For she has sinned against the LORD.
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