As a preface to this piece, I would like to let you know two things.
1. I wrote this for my Sociology class today. I thought it was okay, and since I haven't had time to keep you all posted on our travels, I thought I'd share what I did today.
2. I would like to clarify that the "we" I am using is a collective we. We, as in a society...Some of the references I am making happened to me, some of them to my friends, some of them probably happened to you. So, as to not upset my readership or to hurt anyone's feelings (my childhood was just fine, no complaints)...I use the collective "we" and now...
The Television...
So many social changes have occurred in my lifetime. Computers went from being the size of a room, then they shrunk smaller and were added to our elementary school’s library, they got smaller again and again, and presently laptops are issued to each student across the State of Maine to carry around and use all day long, DURING class (!!), despite almost every student having a cellphone in their pocket more powerful and with more storage than the computers that used to take up an entire room.
Phones during my childhood were found in kitchens mostly, with a cord connecting the handset to the base (strange, I know) with a rotary dial (what is that you ask?) and everyone in the house listened to your side of the call and chimed in as they felt it necessary. Then phones became cordless (we kept the one in the kitchen, just in case) and we could take them into our room for privacy but we had to make sure we didn’t use them for too long, in case someone might be trying to get a hold of our parents (right, we only had one line in the house, and call waiting wasn’t invented yet). Now phones are cellular. They started big (like, really big guys, I laugh when I see one in an old movie), and then they got small, very, very small (those Blackberries, with the itty bitty buttons), and then (what is old is new again, right?) cellphones started getting bigger again. Now we all have our own cellphones, even our kids (much to my displeasure) have them but we rarely use them to talk to anyone. We mainly use them “to stay connected” to the world when we are out to dinner, or in a car (or even in the bathroom). We also use them as a television.
Growing up, we had a television…one…one television, for the family to share. It was supposed to be color, but it had a strange green tint to it. It was supposed to look like a piece of furniture with a wooden casing enclosing all the mechanics, tubes i think, inside. I guess back when they entered the mainstream home it wasn’t supposed to stand out (boy have things changed…). It had knobs that you had to get up off the couch to turn if you wanted to watch something else. My mom kept our most recent school picture in a frame on the top, because it was the biggest piece of furniture we had in the living room, aside from the lovely floral couch. When it broke, and it did break, at least once a year, my father would load it (with help from the neighbor, because it was huge and not in a good way) into our Dodge Rampage (look it up, it was stylish…at the time) and bring the set downtown to be repaired. We would wait a week or so, then it would come home, and we would continue fighting over who got to pick the channel until dinner time. After dinner, the adults chose. Everyone was welcome to stay and watch “This Old House” or “Jeopardy.” Unless you didn’t eat your vegetables…
Dinner, by the way, is a meal most people used to eat in the evening, at a table, together, while it was still light out. As soon as everyone was home, it was dinner time. Everyone in the house (your friends included, if they happened to be there) would gather and sit all together for that meal, and speak to one another, face to face. Sounds shockingly uncomfortable, right? Sometimes it was. But you sat there anyway, like it or not.
Anyway, I’ll cut my walk down memory lane short…the television is central to my memories of dinner, because we would spin that big television set around from the corner of the living room into the doorway of the kitchen and watch the evening news during dinner. Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, the funny guy at the end of 60 Minutes. It was from this massive, green hued television screen, during dinner, that I watched the Challenger explode (on the news, not in real time, I was in pre-school that day), I watched as George H.W. Bush swore to us all, “no new taxes” (I think there were new taxes though), I watched as (Stormin’) Norman Schwarzkopf led us into war with Iraq, and as we shot the newest invention in warmongering technology (scud missiles) into the air every night. They looked like shooting stars and I couldn’t pull myself away. I watched the ball drop in Times Square, I watched the Mousketeers sing and dance (before Brittney Spears, although you may not remember who she is either), I watched the ninja turtles (the first time around, not the second, or the third time they cycled in popularity), Fragglerock, Family Ties, and Lady and the Tramp on VHS. I even got to play Pitfall with my uncle’s outgrown hand-me-down Atari on that green tv screen. We went from having 12 channels to 35. We went from an antenna to cable. We went from dinner at 5, to dinner at 6, to dinner after sports in the living room watching tv, to “find your own dinner, we’re watching tv.” Eventually, we all had our own tv’s.
As the television first brought us local news from our community and state, it next captured the city news from Boston, then from all around the world on CNN 24 hours a day, and the family dinner slowly evaporated right along with the size and weight of that television. Maybe it was because the news became so time flexible, dinner could be too. Or maybe once we didn’t have to get up to change the channel (remote controls, remember those?), we realized we didn’t have to get up from the couch to eat either. While we may have all been in the same room, sometimes eating the same thing, sometimes not, we stopped looking at each other, we stopped talking to each other, and we stopped laughing with each other. We stopped stopping, and started going, just going and doing, and doing and going, and going and going and going, without our family by our side to support us and cheer us on, or to tell us when enough is enough. Just like television killed the radio star, television also killed the family dinner and the family that ate it.
Without the family dinner, children don’t have a guaranteed time to see their parents, to get undivided attention, to express their feelings, to ask for help, to connect on the most basic level with their parents and siblings. Parents don’t get to hear about the school day, or hear about friends, the gossip, the good and the bad. We don’t connect with our spouses on the same level either, and our children see that we are not connected, not on the same page, and they are worse off for it. We don’t have a chance to teach our children how to cook, how to do dishes, how to use proper manners, how to set a table and which order the forks and knives go in. We’ve lost so much more than a meal. We’ve lost respect for elders and communication skills, we’ve lost manners and family values, we’ve lost family cohesiveness, we’ve lost the family, all because of the television.
So I ask you today, are you watching television right now? Right now, in the background din of your home, is there a television on? If so, when was the last time you shut it off? When was the last time you cooked a meal and sat at the table to eat it? Was your family there? If not, why not? What were they doing that was more important than dinner time? I call on everyone today to bring back the family dinner. The kids won't like it at first. They will probably complain and make faces at you the whole time. They may not be accustomed to eating the meal (the ONE meal) that you prepared. That's okay! Don't worry about it. Just keep on doing it. Keep sitting down and eating dinner, together as a family. It will start feeling normal again. We will all start becoming a cohesive family again. We will! We are social creatures and we mate for life (sort of, and hopefully....). Our children need us to eat dinner with them, they will never admit it, I wouldn't have, but the structure of dinner time, of teaching and handing down recipes, of laughing and joking with one another, of sharing happiness and love with one another...our children need that. We all need that. The world is going by too fast, right in front of us. So let's slow it down. If we all slow down together, the world will be forced to slow down with us, otherwise they will have no audience. Let's make dinner time a priority again.
Let's put our phones and our tv's away and have some suppah togethah.