Television Children Fed

Breakfast where the news is read; television children fed

This is my favorite lyric from the Doors. To me it describes my generation perfectly. We grew up with television as our babysitter, our teacher, our escape from mom and dad. As adults, it is still an escape from the problems of the world (if we don’t watch the news) and our spouses. Well, we can watch the news specially tailored to our own prejudices and belief systems on cable. Select CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. We can hear what we want to hear while our spouses complain about the dog wanting to go outside or the cats needing food.

Then why are we not ready for digital television? Since television is central to the lives of Americans, why are we not ready? I find that ironic that most of us who are TV addicts are connected to cable and will not need to worry about the digital conversion. We are ready. The others in the minority do not watch television. They surf the internet or read books.

Our household became HD enlightened when lightning destroyed many of our household electronics last spring. Otherwise, we might be lagging as the plan was to buy all the HD stuff in late 2008. Of course, by then we were unemployed. The expensive conversion to HD would have probably been shelved for a while.

Is the downturn in our economy responsible for us not being HD ready? That must be fixed. In the past, I may have cried, “I want my, I want my MTV.” Today, it is give me my twenty movie channels in hopes that I can find one movie a week to watch.