#5. TV Dumbs it Down

Technically, there isn't anything wrong with watching Television. I do it, you do it, and the majority of people in the United States are right there with us. Television is a cheap form of entertainment. It brings families together on Pizza-Movie night. Many cartoons teach proper morals to young children. After a long day of work, a half-hour comedy is not a bad way to relax. Beyond that some shows can have inspiring and incredibly complicated plots.

This being said, a society where too much emphasis is placed on television-bad television especially-is not a good thing. It didn't take long after the advent of the television for producers to discover that they didn't have to make good TV to make money. In fact, they found that the more ludicrous a show the more money they could make. Constantly I see shows such as "Duck Dynasty" or "Idiot Abroad" taking over a channel. The latter is literally a show in which a complete imbecile is plucked off the street and sent around the world so that he may offend people of other cultures. Television today isn't considered something relaxing to be watched in moderation. Instead it is something lazy, meant to require the least possible amount of brain cells to process, and watched at hours at a time.

The allure of television is a strong one. To be flipping channels and find something so ridiculous, but so real, how could one not be curious? It's so tempting to say, "just a few more minutes, just until I find out what happens to this character. Okay, maybe one more episode..." After all, what is there to get back to? More boredom? More work? More plain old boring reality?

And so its easy to let one's addiction to TV escalate, until it seems that the plight of one's favorite characters and the actors who play them is more important than anything else. It's more interesting to see the reaction of your favorite actor, who just won an award, than to hear about another scientist doing another experiment you hardly understand. It's easy to forget to keep up with intellectually stimulating news, and to forget knowledge once acquired. Some TV shows even make fun of this, such as a popular online show "Why We Hate America". In this show random pedestrians are put on the spot to answer basic questions, such as pointing to a country on a map. One man, asked to point to North Korea, pointed to France and said that we should "blow it up."

The dumbing down of America may be a problem, but what are we to do about it? Television is not the only problem. Inadequate education systems is a much bigger worry, along with rewarding adequate behavior and making a decent education completely out of the price range of anyone who can't afford to get by without it. The most we can do is remember that learning is a positive thing. It is something that can be as entertaining and stimulating as Television. We remember to read good books and to not settle for bad TV, as much as we can.