Television and the Stupidity Index

Teach a child to love books and you will feed their brain for a lifetime. Put them in front of a television and they will be entertained for a spell.

I recently bought five boxes of books from a neighbor and one of the boxes contained many children's books in near perfect condition. Most of the books appeared to be unread. I was delighted when I realized what I had bought, as we have a young visitor at our house fairly often and I plan on sharpening my old geezer skills, by reading to him. My nephew, who fathered this little guy, came over yesterday and when he left, I gave him one of these books and instructed him to read it to his son and then make a big deal setting it on a shelf, so the boy could begin building his own library.

I explained that I began my love of books that way and as an adult; I still hoard books for the knowledge they contain. It all started for me at a young age by realizing books were special and something to desire. I received books for Christmas and birthdays and although I wasn't actually given to reading them at the time, I cherished them as prized possessions. Eventually, I turned the desire to just own books into reading them.

A real turning point for me was right after Christmas while in the 4 th grade. I rode my new bicycle over to visit one of my teachers (for some reason) and after she ooh'ed and ah'ed over my bike, she gave me a one volume Encyclopedia as a present. To this day, I don't know what prompted her to give me that tome, but I am forever in her debt.

I am still a voracious reader of books, magazines, email, cereal boxes, online forums, newspapers and Google News and sadly, amongst my peers, I've discovered I am in the minority in this regard. Most people I know simply watch television for all their entertainment and media needs.

The famous Science-Fiction Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Ray Bradbury, recently excited the literary world by dropping the bombshell that his classic futuristic book "Fahrenheit 451" was not about government censorship at all, but about how television was destroying an interest in reading literature. This struck home with me, as I feel the same way and having read his book three times, I now make the connection.

Repeatedly over the years, I too have realized we are being dumbed-down by the constant bombardment television puts on us. Is television making us stupid? I think it is. It is surely diluting our values and accosting us with so much useless factoid garbage, that remembering actual important events becomes clouded and nearly impossible.

One real contributor to our developing Stupidity Index, that is virtually nonexistent in books, is the multiplied steady diet of commercials. We are told everyday why what we have is no longer enough and we need to buy something else. It's like the drip-drip-drip of the old Chinese water torture. Eventually, even the most diehard resistant consumer is going to give in and make a purchase, they probably don't need. We are indexed pawns in the commercialized society we live in. Yes folks, we are pawns for Mattress Mac and any fast-talking business owner who can afford the airtime

Your car, house, shoes, soap, vacuum cleaner and auto-insurance is no longer good enough, so get with it Bub! We get our daily entertainment/adventure stupidity fix from a talking lizard and cavemen, while a hundred years ago; it was Herman Melville, Charles Dickens and Jules Verne who talked to us.

In today's society, Oprah Winfrey is quoted more often than Abraham Lincoln and young people identify more with Paris Hilton and Barry Bonds than Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys? Are you kidding me?

Ray Bradbury is right. You don't have to censor books and make them illegal; people simply need to stop reading them. In 1979, Mr. Bradbury wrote CODA, a short piece explaining how our society's propensity to please everyone and keep offence out of books, is destroying the written word. It's a favorite of mine and I read it often to stay focused on what is right. It evidentially doesn't apply to TV. Mindless offensive drivel is the staple fair on any given channel, either through the broadcast program or a commercial.

I read one time that scientists were conducting studies on the brain and the effect television has on it. They noted that television watchers brainwaves dropped to low levels of activity, while book readers showed very active waves and I do believe this is the case. Television thinks for you and you become nothing more than a casual observer, while reading causes a person to deduce and sift information.

I think it's time to see television for what it really is and on those nights when cavemen and lizards are no longer bumping up the our Stupidity Index, because we've elected to shut off the set, we can have family reading night instead.