newsheadlines

100 Reasons To Trash Your TV

Turn Off Your Television (excerpts)
By L. Wolfe - New Federalist V6, #29

The subconcscious is powerful. It is aware of every particle and detail around you. But it doesn't know the difference between fact or fiction and acts on all information passing through the conscious mind as fact, and responds to it. So what do you think happens when you watch silly, moron, goofy commercials and television programs? They are training your thought processes.
 
I'm talking to you. Yes, you, sitting in front of the television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can hear what I am saying. Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in front of the television set? According to the latest studies, the average American now spends between five and six hours a day watching television. Let's put that in perspective: that is more time than you spend doing anything else but sleeping or working, if you are lucky enough to still have a job.

That's more time than you spend eating, more time than you spend with your partner, more time than with the kids. It's even worse with your children. According to these same studies, young children below school age watch more than eight hours each day. School age children watch a little under eight hours a day. In 1980, the average 20-year-old had watched the equivalent of 14 months of television in his or her brief lifetime. {That's 14 months, 24 hours a day.} More recent figures show that the numbers have climbed: the 20-year-old has spent closer to two full years of his or her life in front of the television set. At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing phenomena. It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more {stupid}. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research began to study such things.
 
As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse. It's the change--the constant trendline downward--that interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch. Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter what people watch. The more television you watch, the less literate, the more stupid you are. Especially in urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired to more than 100 different channels that provide them with all news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all sports, all weather, all financial news and a liberal dose of straight pornography. The proliferation of home video equipment has involved families in video-related activities which are not even considered in the cumulative totals for time Americans spend watching television.
 
You might not actually realize how much you are watching television. But think for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television on, if it isn't on already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing at what is on the screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a show. You eat with it on, maybe in the background, listening for a score or something that happens to a character in a show you follow. When something you are interested in, a show or basketball game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So your attention to what is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no point when you are home, and inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't that right? The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched television, according to the intensity of their viewing.
The studies showed that many people can't sleep without the television turned on!

Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television is bad for your health. They put stories like that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes to stare at the screen, they say. Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want to make another point. Statistically, you are watching TV between six and eight hour a day. It is an addiction that brainwashes.

BRAINWASHING

There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's called "hard brainwashing" is the type you're most familiar with. You've got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare. This brainwashing is called {hard} because its methods are overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force, and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is man's moral strength that informs and orders his power of reason; without it, the mind becomes little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints.

You have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what you look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank stare of a television zombie. This is {soft} brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them. Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you.
 
It works on a principle of tension and release. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the only choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices. Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such choice-making is not a ``rational'' experience. It does not involve the use of creative mental powers; instead you are conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release. The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment {social turbulence}. The last decades have been full of such {social turbulence}--economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, ecological and biological catastrophes. {Social turbulence} creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings.
 
Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems. Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices. It brings you images of the tension and serves up simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality, is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence. Every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.
 
Over the last 30 years, Americans have come to look at their television sets and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts the images, people start changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of their television. Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has become part of our lives. ``Your mind is being shaped and moulded.''
 
There is a network (shadow government) numbering in the tens of thousands worldwide. Occasionally one appears on the nightly news to tell you what you are thinking, by reporting the latest ``opinion polls.'' But for the most part, this network work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution. And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are united by a common world view and common method. It is the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in institutions that pass this power on from generation to generation. They view the common folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them to rule.

One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of populations is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the ``mother'' for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a member. They are the specialists in both hard and soft brainwashing. The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar outfits in the United States and elsewhere, are determined that you should be a television addict, sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing from the ``tube;'' that is how they control you. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching, is prepared to accept that the images that television suggests as reality ARE reality. Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years, confirms this.
 
The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: ``Television as a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are:
 
``1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.
 
``2) The left cortical hemisphere--the center of visual and analytical calculating processes--is effectively reduced in its functioning to tracking changing images on the screen.
 
``3) Therefore, provided, the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness....
 
``In other words, television can be seen partly as the technological analogue of the hypnotist.''
 
The key to making the brainwashing work is the repetition of suggestion over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion. Think back a year: How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on the other. The images repeated in newscasts, backed up by scenes of alleged atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself: the video-game like images of ``smart'' weapons killing Iraqi targets. Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, conducting a final press briefing that was consciously orchestrated to resemble the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory. Those were the images that overwhelmed our population. We murdered far more women and children than we did soldiers. Hardly a ``glorious victory.''

Polls show that Americans no longer find the war or any stories about it ``interesting.'' Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them? Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than 5th grade comprehension level.
 
As Emery explains: ``We are proposing that television as a simple constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central nervous system of man.'' Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American's ability to think:``Americans don't really think--they have opinions and feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it.'' Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable channels. It tells people what has been said and what is ``important.'' Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who can't. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of leadership. Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as choosing a box of laundry detergent:

So, do you want to stay stupid and let your country go to hell in a basket? Why don't you just walk over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely off. Go on, you can do it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little better already? You've just taken the first step in deprogramming yourself. It wasn't that hard, was it? Until we speak again, try to keep it off. Now that will be a bit harder.

TELEVISION ALTERNATIVES

Congratulations, you just received an extra 4 hours per day that you can use to strengthen your family, improve your health, and follow your dreams…

With four hours a day, you can pursue all those goals that over the years slipped quietly into the vortex of your television set. Turn off your TV and you will literally TURN ON your life. As an additional bonus, each member of your family just received the same gift.

• Design a political poster and attend a protest rally.
• Talk with people
• Meditate or join a meditation group
• Find free-thinkers groups, philosopher's cafe's in your area
• Build a meditation altar in your home - buy candles, a meditation fountain
• Change a habit you don't like
• Learn to play the guitar or other instrument and compose music.
• Go to a concert
• Go to the library. Borrow a book. Read David Icke, Eckert Tolle, Zechariah Stitchen, Erich Von Daniken
• Attend library seminars.
• Go ice skating, skiing, roller skating, play badminton, shoot pool, go swimming
• Join a Texas Holdem poker game (free) at a pub in your area.
• Listen to the radio.
• Paint a picture, a mural or a room.
• Find out about your area's community center or park's activities.
• Plan a picnic or barbecue.
• Go on a nature walk
• Make friends and have a relationship with an animal, a tree, a plant.
• Volunteer for a community organization or charity.
• Work out.
• Write a letter to a friend or relative.
• Cook a homemade pizza, cake or something delicious
• Plant a flower, vegetable or herb garden.
• Read alternative magazines or newspapers.
• Throw a party.
• Become a tutor, seminar leader and teach others
• Go camping
• Join a choir or take dance lessons.
• Go through your closets and clothes. Donate surplus items to Goodwill, the Salvation Army or a local rummage sale.
• Start a journal.
• Go to a museum.
• Collect something
• Play cards, games.
• Walk, hike, run, or bike
• Research your family history.
• Visit a bookstore.
• Make or give a gift.
• Write a poem, short story. screenplay, theatrical play.
• Learn to say simple phrases in different languages.
• Learn another language
• Choose a daily affirmation and repeat it to yourself often eg. "I am a compassionate, spiritual being", "I am my own master", "I forgive everyone and everything", "I am a free spirit", "I am grateful for....."
• Ask an older family member to tell you a story about their childhood.
• Watch the night sky through binoculars; identify the different constellations. Look up at cloud patterns
• Visit your local planetarium
• Walk to work or school.
• Join a bowling league. Pool league
• Save money and plan a vacation
• Cancel cable TV!
• Go fishing.
• Attend a Yoga or meditation class.
• Play board games with your family or friends.
• Cook dinner with friends or family.
• Clean up and redecorate your home
• Play with and groom your pet.
• Fly a kite.
• Go on a family trip/historical excursion.
• Build a fort.
• Play Frisbee.
• Go sledding and make a snowman.
• Plan a suprise for someone
• Shoot hoops
• Learn to play chess
• Draw or write poems about places or things you love
• Go to a slam poetry night or open mic poetry reading
• Swap magazines or books with friends.
• Do crossword puzzles.
• Go for a long walk at a new location. Pretend you're a tourist in your own city
• Write a letter to the President or a politician or the editor of a paper or magazine
• Buy a miniature train set and build a railway
• Make funny cards for the holidays or birthdays.
• Play charades.
• Plant a tree somewhere and visit it. Watch it grow.
• Write words of wisdom on slips of paper and give them away
• Write a letter to your grandparents.
• Learn how to use a compass.
• Make friends with someone new
• Go horseback riding
• Learn some new jokes.
• Climb a tree.
• Watch the sunset.
• Have a big party to celebrate a TV-free Week!!

Red Hot Chili Peppers — Throw Away Your Television lyrics

Throw away your television
Time to make this clean decision
Master waits for it's collision now
It's a repeat of a story told
It's a repeat and it's getting old

Throw away your television
Make a break big intermission
Recreate your super vision now
It's a repeat of a story told
It's a repeat and it's getting old

Renegades with fancy gauges
Slay the plague for it's contagious
Pull the plug and take the stages
Throw away your television now

Throw away your television
Take the noose off your ambition
Reinvent your intuition now
It's a repeat of a story told
It's a repeat and it's getting old

Throw away your television
Salivate to repetition
Levitate this ill condition now
It's a repeat