Strange, But True.

[FlyingClayDisk]

I hear what you are saying and it got me to thinking as well.

I grew up with the Sears and Roebuck, and the Montgomery Wards catalog, and the radio.

My family was the first in the community to have a TV set, and it made our house the neighborhood community hang out. It wasn't on that much, the channels were few, and the broadcasting stopped after a certain hour, and all you got was a test pattern. It held little interest for us children, our golden time was outside, trying to find something that would eventually get us in trouble. In other words, we did our job as children.

The time that I not doing chores, I was either in school, I loved school, or I was hunting the woods, with friends, or alone, looking for berries, or what was on the fruit trees. We had a ton of fruit trees, and nut trees, that could hold my interest for more than a spell. Had to watch out for snakes, and for any other thing of interest that may be about. I also read a lot, and when you live in a house with twelve people, the peace of the woods, filled the bill for a lot of your needs.

When I reached the age of covetousness, the only place that I could see things that I did not have, but we're available, were in those catalogs. My world vision was still very small. I had all I needed, and all I really wished for, was the sun to take longer to go down, and quicker to come up. I was a near teen, so the first things I wanted was clothes. I could forget about buying them, but my Mother was a master at looking at something, grabbing a paper bag, making a pattern and reproducing it. The only thing I really craved, really pined for, back then, was growing up. So I could get a job and move away from my boring country roots.

Most folk back then got pleasure from what they had around them, what they could make, or build, and what they could share. The majority of our dreams, were within touching distance, or it was placed in the category of silly, fantasy, or just plain crazy.

With TV came visions of all that you never knew you were lacking. From your homes, to your relationships, and your life, you were left with the feeling of never quite making it, never being able to have it all, and the feeling of being less than.

That is what the TV brought into our lives. It was an instrument that stole your joy and replaced it with visions of an unrealistic world, and with wants that never end, and never quite fulfill. That was the TV, the mother of disappointment. Then came the computer, and we have not seen all the destruction it has yet to bring us.

Just sharing my melancholy thoughts of the moment.

Very well said!  You write very well, and I agree. 

On the subject of TV; where/when I grew up, we did have a TV albeit black and white.  There was only one channel, and like yours, it was only on for part of the day.  The broadcast day began at 7am with the local weather gal, believe it or not her name was Ginger Snapp!  LOL!  I actually met her once, and that was her real, given, name...not a stage name.  (Her parents must have been drunk at the time!)

I don't even really remember TV all that much as a kid.  I rarely ever watched it.  There was one kind of low-budget cartoon I watched sometimes in the afternoons, Gigantor (and I think Speed Racer).  The rest of it was all just noise to me.  I was long gone, out in the desert, doing all the stuff kids can find to do in the high desert (which was a surprising amount of mischief when you got right down to it).  Our biggest exploration tool was our motorized horses, in the form of motorcycles, my buddies and I had cobbled together. 

One of my big recollections, after managing to get a bike that actually ran, was the time Mom told me I was never to go out riding in the desert because I might never return.  I wonder, to this day, how long she thought that instruction would hold with me.  Surely she knew it wouldn't last more than a few dozens of seconds after I walked out the door.  I always hoped she really just meant "be careful", because there was no way a kid could ever resist that vast expanse to go explore.  And explore it we did...every day, for years on end.  It never got old.

And, when I go back, which I will...it will still never be old.