Screens

   There is a scene from the movie "Poltergeist" where a little girl in a terrorized family sits in front of the family T.V. and senses, through the screen, the re-appearance of demonic spirits.
   It is this way in our house every day.
   You simply cannot get away from screens; little ones, big ones, bright ones, dull ones, American ones and Japanese ones, folding ones and sliding ones.

The screen will get you!

   They are ever-present and ever-functioning. They are in every room in the house and every seat in the car, in every pocket and every purse. They are on your desk and on your lap. You can't get away from them.
   These screens bring different things into our lives. Some of what they bring is information; the news, weather, current events. Some of them bring security and communication, the sense that you can be reached in an emergency or that plans can be made or changed. Mostly, though, they bring entertainment.
   Some of the entertainment is pure escapist fun. Some of it is thought-provoking and informative. Much of it is simply mindless.

   It is the mindless stuff emanating from the screens around us that concerns me. If you watch too much of it for too long, your jaw will actually begin to slacken. There is simply a long list of people behaving badly onscreen these days, from cat fights to casual sex to mobsters wives to a thousand ways of dying to cake-baking to which warriors kill the best to self-absorbed housewives from all over the continent. You have shows about polygamy and shows about vehicle repossessions. There are shows about parking enforcement and how to hurt someone as a practical joke, for goodness sake! And, in all of these, there are the afore-mentioned people behaving badly.

   There are almost no shows about redemptive behaviour to be found. It didn't seem that long ago where T.V. had a plethora of shows wherein the characters actually had some character. You could name "The Cosby Show", "Little House on the Prairie", "Stairway to Heaven", "Touched By An Angel" and, before all these, you had "My Three Sons", "Leave it to Beaver", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Father Knows Best" and on and on and on.
   For the most part, people in the old shows got into predicaments and then learned how to get out of them the right way, generally through honesty, foresight, introspection and good manners. Not a lot of that kind of stuff pops out at you through screens these days. You don't even need talent to be on T.V. anymore, all you really need to know is how to chase pigs, trap vermin, shoot alligators, choose a wedding dress, renovate a house, drive poorly,or sing badly. When it comes right down to it, all you really need to have in order to be on T.V. these days is a job...
   If you're an adult and you're reading this then none of it is news. If you're an adult and you've got a house full of kids then, right at the moment, you're up against it. I'm probably a little to blame myself, I do spend an inordinate amount of time in front of a screen, generally my laptop. I'm usually checking Facebook, checking e-mails or playing games. A huge chunk of that, though, is spent doing what I'm doing right now. Blogging. At times, blogging itself is a little mindless but most of the time it's pretty heavy darn slogging with a lot of mental energy expended. I am also guilty of checking e-mails from my phone (and its little screen) throughout the day. None of this is going to leave me slack-jawed anytime soon, though, thank goodness.
   As bad as all this is now, it seems as though it can only get worse. I don't see the current young generation tiring of the things they see on screens anytime soon. People are actually dying because what they think they might see on a screen while driving is more important to them than what they might see through their car's windshield. It is not uncommon to enter a den or living room these days and have every person present there engaged with a screen of various size. Sometimes they are engaged with multiple screens.

No screen--just straight to the brain!

   It's hard to say where all this might end. Every once in awhile we force all the screens to close down and we actually do something. The strange part is, we usually enjoy whatever that activity is. Sooner or later, though, it's back to the screens. Perhaps eventually there will be no more screens, we will all have neuron implants and the information or entertainment we seek will just go straight to our brains. And, by then, we will all need our jaws wired in the closed position!