The Trouble With Television                      

Robert MacNeil 

It is difficult to escape the influence of television.  If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television.  You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20.  The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.

Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours.  Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor』s degree.  In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer.  You could have learned several languages fluently.  If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian.  If it didn』t, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.

The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration.  Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort.  The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything.  But television encourages us to apply no effort.  It sells us instant gratification.  It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.

Television』s variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus.  Its serial, kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead.  The viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the cathedral, 30 for a drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on television, typically, the spans allotted are on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another.  In short, a lot of television usurps one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it 

Our Son Mark                 

S. I. Hayakawa 

It was a terrible blow for us to discover that we had brought a retarded child into the world.  My wife and I had had no previous acquaintance with the problems of retardation—not even with the words to discuss it.  Only such words as imbecile, idiot, and moron came to mind.  And the prevailing opinion was that such a child must be 「put away,」 to live out his life in an institution.

Mark was born with Down』s syndrome, popularly known as mongolism.  The prognosis for his ever reaching anything approaching normality was hopeless.  Medical authorities advised us that he would show some mental development, but the progress would be painfully slow and he would never reach an adolescent』s mental age.  We could do nothing about it, they said.  They sympathetically but firmly advised us to find a private institution that would take him.  To get him into a public institution, they said, would require a waiting period of five years.  To keep him at home for this length of time, they warned, would have a disastrous effect on our family.

That was twenty-seven years ago.  In that time, Mark has never been 「put away.」  He has lived at home.  The only institution he sees regularly is the workshop he attends, a special workshop for retarded adults.  He is as much a part of the family as his mother, his older brother, his younger sister, his father, or our longtime housekeeper and friend, Daisy Rosebourgh.

Mark has contributed to our stability and serenity.  His retardation has brought us grief, but we did not go on dwelling on what might have been, and we have been rewarded by finding much good in things the way they are.  From the beginning, we have enjoyed Mark for his delightful self.  He has never seemed like a burden.  He was an 「easy」 baby, quiet, friendly, and passive; but he needed a baby』s care for a long time.  It was easy to be patient with him, although I must say that some of his stages, such as his love of making chaos, as we called it, by pulling all the books he could reach off the shelves, lasted much longer than normal children』s.

Mark seems more capable of accepting things as they are than his immediate relatives; his mental limitation has given him a capacity for contentment, a focus on the present moment, which is often enviable.  His world may be circumscribed, but it is a happy and bright one.  His enjoyment of simple experiences—swimming, food, birthday candles, sports-car rides, and cuddly cats—has that directness and intensity so many philosophers recommend to all of us.

Mark』s contentment has been a happy contribution to our family, and the challenge of communicating with him, of doing things we can all enjoy, has drawn the family together. And seeing Mark』s communicative processes develop in slow motion has taught me much about the process in all children. 

The Ways of Meeting Oppression  

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oppressed people deal with their oppression in three characteristic ways.  One way is acquiescence: the oppressed resign themselves to their doom.  They tacitly adjust themselves to oppression and thereby become conditioned to it.  In every movement toward freedom some of the oppressed prefer to remain oppressed.  Almost 2800 years ago Moses set out to lead the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the promised land.  He soon discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers.  They become accustomed to being slaves.  They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to others that they know not of.  They prefer the 「fleshpots of Egypt」 to the ordeals of emancipation.

A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.  Violence often brings about momentary results.  Nations have frequently won their independence in battle.  But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.  It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance.  Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—the acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.  The nonviolent resister agrees with the person who acquiesces that one should not be physically aggressive toward his opponent; but he balances the equation by agreeing with the person of violence that evil must be resisted.  He avoids the nonresistance of the former and the violent resistance of the latter.  With nonviolent resistance, no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence in order to right a wrong.