TV-Turnoff Week Again? Where’s My Library Card?

Hey, you! Stop watching TV!

No, I haven’t had an epiphany, I’m not fed up and can’t take it anymore. I don’t have a career death wish.

It’s just time for TV-Turnoff Week 2000--Monday-April 30--an annual institution I can’t recommend highly enough.

I’m not kidding.

I, myself, tube-glued TV critic, actually went TV-free for seven days to write about the first TV-Turnoff Week back in 1995. And lived to tell about it.

And love to tell about it. Since the tube is pretty much always on in our house, the initial withdrawal was difficult--can’t I at least watch the Weather Channel?--but the eventual rewards were amazing. Even opening the mail in silence, I realized and wrote, “I’m never doing just one thing, because the TV’s always on. My attention is diffused. Flitting from one thing to the next is pretty much my normal mode. And do I really absorb any of those things?”

The hectic pace of electronic media, too, suddenly struck me as “a cacophony” of “too much happening at once,” too much noise, too many images, too many concepts, too abruptly and fleetingly delivered.

I began to see how TV, watched wantonly, can start to suck the life out of your life. “You start to think its lightning pace, snap judgments and emotional manipulation are the way life inevitably works. I feel like constant watching had rewired my body clock.”

Unplugging made me feel calmer, more centered and better able to put things in perspective, even when it came--especially when it came--to the news. “Staying constantly ‘in touch’ only serves to get us gratuitously worried, agitated or amused.”

So did I stop watching TV after the week? Obviously not. I’m still glued to the tube. But I became aware of how I watch TV, and what it does to me. To us. Television has become such an overwhelming presence in so many lives that the medium itself becomes invisible. We don’t realize how it filters into nearly everything we think and do. See enough Columbine coverage and you’re convinced schools are Saigon, when the truth is juvenile violence is actually down, according to a report released last week by the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute.

And you feel resentfully deprived of the luxuries you “deserve,” when the fact is middle-class Americans are better off than practically everybody on the planet. Everything seems urgent! Intimate! Exciting! And if it isn’t, we hit the remote. TV thrives on emotion. Thinking usually isn’t part of the process.

Not that it can’t be--and that’s what a TV-free week can demonstrate. TV-Turnoff Network, the nonprofit, nonpartisan group behind TV-Turnoff Week, doesn’t seek to abolish the tube, nor does it criticize certain types of programs, as many “morals” groups do.

The group, formerly called TV-Free America, seeks to “move beyond the old discussions about program content and instead focus on what all TV viewing displaces: creativity, productivity, healthy physical activity, civic engagement, reading, thinking and doing,” says its Web site (https://www.tvfa.org). No censorship here. The group simply “encourages Americans to reduce, voluntarily and dramatically, the amount of television they watch in order to promote richer, healthier and more connected lives, families and communities.”

Before you say, “Nah, not me,” give a TV-free week a shot. You’ll start to realize how turning on the set is a reflex, how watching it can become a sort of hypnosis, how it insinuates itself into the role of default activity. Bored? Watch TV. Nothing to do? Watch TV. And how, in today’s America, in our plenteous lives filled with resources, opportunities and options, can we ever have “nothing” to do?

It only seems that way because it’s so easy to plop down and watch, making everything else seem like too much effort. But “everything else” can pay rewards TV usually doesn’t. How much of our viewing is truly active, in that we consciously choose to turn on a specific show and give it our full attention, and perhaps come away with something lasting? Not much, likely. Many of us mostly watch to while away the time. And we don’t realize how much time we’ve whiled away. Until we stop doing it. Then, it’s astounding.

Am I preaching with the zeal of the converted? Obviously, I’m still a sinner myself, or I wouldn’t know infomercial king Ron Popeil like an uncle or Don Francisco’s “Sabado Gigante” ad jingles. I even watch TV in languages I can’t understand. But I’m more aware of what I’m doing. And sometimes I can stop myself from turning on the tube in the first place. It’s worth the effort.

For more information on TV-Turnoff Week or to order an organizer’s kit with tip book, pledge cards and posters, go to https://www.tvfa.org or call (800) 939-6737.