Who makes this stuff? It's kinda funny, kinda not.
I think there is a lot of truth to it. Max obviously went too far, but he shed some light on a very ugly topic and I think religion is at the base of it. It will probably just fuel the hatred, but maybe some good can come out of it. Oops, I might sound self-righteous for saying that since I'm a BYU fan. Oh well.
And this from one of Rick's friends: "After considerable discussion and pondering on my part over the weekend, I can't say it better than Bronco. "I can't condone it, but I understand it." Shouldn't have said it in that setting, but it needed to be said by someone, sometime.
I have zero faith that the worst of the worst of Utah's fans will ever change their idiotic ways, but if Max's comments will shake something loose up on the Hill with those in a position to do something about it (I'm pretty sure the fans will only get worse), then I say "Way to go Max."
It burns me up that the U of U (including their "good" fans) allow people to act that way and do nothing about it."
What we need are more stand up people like Amanda Dixon. This is her piece from last year:
I am not a wuss, not easily offended, not above occasional salty language to make a point. But I never direct that language at someone in anger, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had it directed at me in that way - until Saturday.
I attended the big game with my brother Dave, my husband Aaron and 15-year-old son Cameron. There were also some friends and clients of my brother's in our group, some of whom were BYU fans. Those of you who know me know I graduated from the U . . . twice. But Saturday, I was ashamed of my alma mater.
As we walked to the stadium, every group wearing blue was greeted with multiple "F--- you!"s or a middle finger or both. A fight broke out near where my brother and son were sitting that got so out of control, Dave thought he should get Cameron out of there. Where we were sitting, a guy behind us found out one guy in our party was a BYU fan and shouted, "You've got to be f---in' kidding me!" repeatedly throughout the game. He would also shout "Break his legs" or arms or something else every time the U was on defense. We felt insecure enough that I spent the game worrying about our new friend being hurt rather than celebrating the terrific play on the field.
The U is my university. I went to school there. I taught in the Communications Department. I served on the Crimson Club board for several years. And I may never attend another football game. If I cannot feel safe in the stands, safe enough to not only attend myself but take my children or friends, I don't want to be there. And before you tell me this is just the way sporting events are, that this happens at other stadiums, let me admit that you may be right. And if that dehumanizing of our culture is prevalent enough, then I'll rethink my behavior in other arenas as well. But for now, the celebration of my school's perfect season is dampened by the inexcusable behavior of its out-of-control fans.
And this from another who lives out of state:
Rick: You hit the nail on the head. You mentioned the
religious hatred and I'll just say that I think a lot of
Utes use the athletic rivalry as a venue to "get" the
Church. And sure, there are plenty of great Utah grads,
we each have kids that have graduated from there. I get
that. But just as I am troubled by the paucity of Muslims
that will stand up and denounce their terrorist brethren
for being wrong, I find it really irritating that my Ute
friends always overlook the religious hatred of some of
their fellow fans. That nonsense needs to stop and they,
the active members of the church who are Utes need to
stand up and say enough and quit looking the other way.
I love the quote by Bill Bennett, something like
"religious bigotry is the last form of
acceptable bigotry in the U.S." It is frustrating.
And another example...see this article from CNN today about Mitt Romney's faith being an obstacle to his presidential campaign and why.
Claire is a big fan of the New Yorker magazine. She has shared some articles and copies the magazine with us. I thought this cover was particularly interesting. A picture speaks one thousand words. Click it to enlarge and look at it closely.
The most complete study of TV habit and addiction comes from researchers Robert Kubey, a professor at Rutgers University and director of the Center for Media Studies, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University. In the article "Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor," (Scientific American, February 2002) Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi describe their experiment and results with a technique called the Experience Sampling Method (ESM):
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"To track behavior and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the lab, we have used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Participants carried a beeper, and we signaled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling using a standardized scorecard.
"As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive.
"What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted. They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading. After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people's moods are about the same or worse than before.
"Thus, the irony of TV: people watch a great deal longer than they plan to, even though prolonged viewing is less rewarding. In our ESM studies the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction they said they derived from it. When signaled, heavy viewers (those who consistently watch more than four hours a day) tended to report on their ESM sheets that they enjoy TV less than light viewers did (less than two hours a day)."
Kubey's conclusion makes perfect logical sense. Television watching is not an "experience" but instead it replaces experiences. So TV watchers exchange the real world for the virtual one behind the screen. The cultural pressure and acceptance of heavy TV watching combined with the habitual nature of the medium can produce an unholy marriage between one's inactivity and boredom.
If you are a big fan of Philo T. Farnsworth’s invention, you may not like the opinion I’m about to share. You may think that I am (choose the one that best applies):
OK, now that I've got that out of the way, I can begin. I’m not targeting anyone in particular. I guess that if I were to join a cause, this would be one among many that I would join. It would be the cause of promoting less TV watching in the world. I feel pretty adamant about it for lots of different reasons. But first, a couple of disclaimers.
I didn’t always feel this way. I watched TV with the best of them on our black and write TV in Rupert Idaho. My dad even went to get lengths to get Channel 5 TV from Salt Lake City so that we could watch the LDS general conference twice a year and get some better programming from Utah. We had the most enormous TV antenna of anyone around, but we got Channel 5! We had about four other channels and we watched our favorite programs. I could tell you which programs were on which nights for the entire week. Not too hard with only a few channels. I watched Saturday morning cartoons with gusto. Those were the days. Programming was fairly tame and reflected community values. Lucy and Ricky even slept in separate beds back in those days.
When I broke my femur and had to be bed ridden for three months, I watched a million hours of TV. Soap operas, game shows, and all the evening programming. Yes, I WASTED a ton of time, but I also read all the Lord of the Rings books and did a bunch of hand work. But I digress. More on this story another day. Back to the TV. It helped pass many hours while I was just lying there, doing absolutely nothing.
I’m not a huge proponent of not allowing TV watching on Sunday for religious reasons. We allowed it and our kids (especially the boys and Claire) watched sports a lot on Sunday when there wasn’t much else going on. They also played a ton of video games. I will admit that I used both as a babysitter when I was home alone for many years and their dad was at the church all day on Sunday. I’m sure we could have done more worthwhile things, but alas, we did not. I usually took a nap or read while they watched sports, even though we did accomplish some things of worth during the course of the long day at home after we got back from church. I have a few regrets about that now, but I was in survival mode back in those days.
In our early married years, we watched Dallas religiously. I also watched some other night time dramas. I was also a fan of the miniseries and loved watching Lonesome Dove, Shogun, the Thornbirds, and North and South just to name a few. I could keep up with the best of TV watchers. I was working, so I wasn’t a big day time watcher and I never got into Oprah, thankfully.
Then, something happened. We got kids. I guess this is what it was. When they were young, we watched a lot of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. I could tell you what time each kid’s program came on and we/they often watched several programs each day. They watched the regular kids programs like Full House and Power Rangers. We tried to monitor for content and for total number of hours watched each day. Sometimes we were more successful than other times.
We’ve never had a TV in the kitchen. I only got a TV in our bedroom when we had one extra to put there. I’ve mostly use it to watch an occassional movie while the rest of my family is watching sports. I do not think that TVs belong in bedrooms, especially bedrooms of children. I really do not like having the TV on in the background. It bugs me to no end to have the sound of it going when other things are happening.
As our kids grew, I started watching TV through their eyes. I got the notion (either through my child development classes or through reading) that allowing kids to watch a lot of hours of TV wasn’t a good thing. Young developing brains watching all those flashing images wasn’t good. Then there was the issue of time spent inside just sitting versus time spent outside playing and moving around. Time spent watching TV versus time spent reading. Time spent watching poor examples instead of watching good examples. Time spent watching (and often eating) in silence instead of talking and exchanging ideas. I’ve observed that TV and food often go hand in hand, or hand to mouth, or hand to mouth to expanding waistline. There was also time spent watching all the new products available to buy instead of being satisfied with what we had. Time listening to people talk the way we didn’t talk and dress the way we didn’t dress and do things we didn’t do. Immoral ideas and ways of living were presented that went against what we believed. There was smoking, drinking, drug abuse, violence and carousing around depicted as exciting and acceptable. I know that there are speical DVRs that edit out all the crap on TV, but it's still a major time drain even if the content is edited. I recall that we began to steer our family away from this past time. It happened naturally and there weren’t any big issues with limited TV time in our home.
As time went on, TV became more of a weekend thing in our home and it was mostly spent watching sports. True, Claire, Jordan and I watched ER for many years, but not much else. There simply wasn’t time or interest. We were busy doing other things. We rarely turned on the TV in the evenings. There were meetings to attend and homework assignments to get gone. And guess what? We didn’t’ miss it. It wasn’t something we felt deprived of watching. And one of the biggest benefits of all? I think our kids did better in school because of limited TV time. This was a HUGE benefit that I didn't fully appreciate until years later.
I’ve never watched an entire episode of Friends or Cheers or Seinfeld. OK, maybe I have watched a few reruns of Seinfeld on the insistence of others. There were a few good laughs, but it made me squirm more often than not. I absolutely HATE the Simpsons, but I was mostly alone in this campaign to banish it from the house. I really tried to get into reality shows. I watched the whole first series of Survivor and went away feeling manipulated and controlled by the producers. I felt that it wasn’t very interesting to see people treat other people poorly or to watch what they ate and didn’t eat and participate in very strange competitions. Then along came singing, dancing and losing weight in front of the national audience. I’ve watched a few episodes of each so as to be conversant with others, but honestly, I just don’t care and I don’t find it very entertaining at all. And horror of horrors, I don’t like The Office that much although I have given it the good college try. I didn’t even know that Pam and Jim got married and that she is expecting until last weekend. Sad for me I know.
So as to not appear like a total self righteous prude who is out of touch with reality, I will admit to loving a good movie. If I do watch TV, I would watch the movie channel, no question about it. I love old movies and classic movies that tell a good story. I appreciate good acting and I love period pieces the most of all. They transport the viewer to another time and place. I love a good action movie, some science fiction and some sappy romance movies, and yes, many of these movies have the undesirable elements in them that were mentioned before. It’s hard to steer completely free of them all, but at least a person can read a review before seeing a movie to know what they are getting into, unlike the TV. While all content isn’t the best, watching a movie once in awhile only takes a couple of hours during the course of an entire week, not a couple of hours or more a day.
There is a ton of research out there on the pros (a few) and cons (volumes) of TV watching. I’ll share some of my findings for those who are interested in future posts. If you are a fan of TV watching on a regular basis, more power to you! I just think that the primary reasons for seriously considering watching less TV are these:
However, there are some reasons I like to watch TV on occasion:
“Stay tuned” for more info on the power, influence and effects of TV watching on our lives, our families and our culture.
