Dear Television,
Here is why I don’t like you, and this is why I don’t think we can be together.
You have replaced reality.
I know you were made for bigger things. You were key, a revolutionary system of sound and picture that changes how the world communicates. Oh, you were so great, so connected. Suddenly mankind could see and hear across the globe, and cultures opened before our senses. You even started coming in color. But you’ve changed, television, and this isn’t me saying it in some ornery grandma kind of way.
You have stolen our children. You have been the force behind them being seen and not heard, as they glue their burning corneas to your pixels and avoid nature, games, interaction with actual real and living things.
They take you for reality. Their maleable putty-like minds soak you in, accepting your images as truth and attainable. Skinny arms, skinny waists, skinny jeans, anti-Rubenesque. Your “breaking news” makes significance out of molehills. If only life was truly that simple, that we needed to know about a celebrity’s DUI to understand how the world works.
You’ve become a constant, an addition to the ongoing white noise that keeps us tied to sofas. And if we aren’t tied to sofas, you’re there, in front of my treadmill. We’ve become dependent on your overstimulation, bored without your noise and moving scenes. You have overwhelmed our senses so that we no longer know how to be calm.
You dang machine which we’ve gotten obsessed with, first wanting color, then size, then flat-screened, then blue-rayed and hdr-ed and recordable and tivoed. You are an unsatisfying affair.
You’ve created an escapist culture, where the reality of reality is too much, that people turn to you. They “veg” before you. Instead of introspection of our own hearts and minds, we avoid, looking to sitcom solutions. It is so much easier to turn you on then to sit with myself, the real reality show.
I know you are here to stay. But I’m leaving. I will listen and look at real people in my life, care for the actual individuals in front of me. Make-up less, broken, raw with no soundtrack and no easy solutions. Quiet and loud souls that need deep prayers and deep conversation.
I’m sorry. I know you were meant to be more. But this isn’t working out, and this time, it really is you.
~Jess Fong
