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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2007 > April > 25
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
What would happen if we turned off our screens
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Roswell Parks and Recreation department came up with an interesting idea. Turn off the TV and computers for a week and see how it goes. It’s “Turn Off Your Screen Week.”
I think that it may make for an interesting week.
The average household has three televisions and watches more than eight hours of television a day. In our house, we have seven televisions but we may only watch about four hours of television a day because we can’t find the remotes to the seven televisions.
I imagine if we banned television and computers for a week, two things would immediately increase, murder and pregnancy. Black outs were famous for boosting the population. The New York City blackout in 1977 was credited for boosting the birth rate nine months later by 35 percent. What wasn’t clear was how many of those babies were ugly. It was dark, people were bored and nine months later they were saying: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I’ll bet that if in the spring, summer, and fall, we went days, weeks, or a couple of months without TV and skipped at least recreational use of computers, people would start getting in shape by walking, running, biking or whatever. Things around the house would get done and we’d probably get to know more people. I’m sure the population would show a significant increase because all work and no play make something, uh— whatever. I just know that nature knows when to party. In the winter we’d all kill one another.
In Georgia, the winter is that time we need to just hang on until spring. Of course winter here is just late January and February with a few teaser days in March. One day in the 70s and the next glaciers form in the driveway. We don’t really like winter because it means ice. People from up north, love to poke fun at us for our silliness when we get a snowflake. It’s true. When the forecast says “possible snow” we all get all messed up and do silly things like run into the grocery store screaming for milk, bread, and Foxglove Chardonnay 2006!
Still, I think that reducing television time would be a good idea in moderation. Remove some of the non-essential time slots, say anything with Rosie O’Donnell in it or that commercial where the girl in the red dress jumps up and down holding some cash in her hand to the tune of that annoying little jingle, just before she realized she just signed her car away. There is a lot of stuff there we could do without.
