While not one for casual bragging about making discoveries or stating predictions, I’m about to go out on a limb with a radical theory of what is afflicting the American character at this time and what we’ll do to fix our situation. First, we are seeing the effect of nearly 70 years of a malignant disease that has been metastasizing right in front of our faces. I’m calling it Television Effectuated Retrograde Dementia Syndrome or TERDS. Second, the television as we’ve known it is going away.
This box of banality must go away; the big question, though, is when? Somewhere in the future, people will look back at the primitivism of those who voluntarily watched decades of the rubbish broadcast to the masses. They will ask, “How and why did you waste so much of your precious mind only to suffer from TERDS?”
Just as we recognize the great harm from smoking, lead in everyday products, asbestos in building supplies, and toxic pesticides in the food chain, society will recognize the profoundly damaging effect that television is having on culture, education, and social cohesion. A large part of this awareness will arise as others discover what I’m putting forth today: society is seeing the effect of what, at its scientific base, is best described as Type 4 Diabetes. We learned that a poor diet and steady consumption of nutritionally compromised fast food mixed with a sedentary lifestyle leads to metabolic syndrome, which is the precursor to Type 2 Diabetes. Just as detrimental, the constant feeding on broadcast television creates its own intellectual metabolic syndrome, a.k.a. Type 4 Diabetes, which will lead people to TERDS.
In the mid-1980s, Joshua Meyrowitz, author of “No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior,” posed the question of why we are allowing the uncontrolled experiment of electronic media to destroy our sense of place. Then, by the second decade of the 21st century, the entire globe began witnessing what a diet of television had created. Denial of our reality had pundits blaming our malaise on social media and upon the shoulders of a younger generation. The truth is that the ills afflicting the diseased American populace are a psychic catastrophe unfolding with potentially horrible consequences. The long tail of Baby Boomers’ excess consumption of junk food TV is now lashing the sensibility of everyone it ensnares. It is time to put the beast to sleep; it is time to shut down this medium, which is nothing more than a moroseness drug trade bent on making a profit at any cost.
Reading, conversation, storytelling, exercise, exploration, discovery, and a broad diversity of sensorial inputs are necessary for good mental hygiene. Repetitive use of low-grade mental trash inhibits curiosity and the desire for broad-spectrum stimulation.
Like cigarettes, where smoking a couple a week might only have negligible damaging effects, occasional television watching could be similar. The problem here is that, like cigarettes where the consumer is quickly smoking a pack a day, the TV viewer ends up watching hours per day. This acts as a strangulation device, cutting off the user’s ability to comprehend different points of view outside of the spectrum of their conditioning. Hence, their loyalty to brands, celebrities, teams, programs, and products to the exclusion of new stimuli.
Oxygen-rich verbal exchange with others, even when it occurs through media such as books, art, and music that requires attentive listening or wandering in nature, is an elixir that lubricates the senses to bloom and facilitates the pollination of the mind. For stronger, healthier minds and ridding society of TERDS, it is time to kill your TV.