Get a life apart from commercialized American Culture

We have a lot of choices. We don't have to watch television or permit our children to watch it. We don't have to buy a computer, though a computer, properly used, is better than a television set.

Television, movies, radio, magazines and newspapers transmit much of what can be fairly called America's decadent culture. As sacrilegious as it sounds, not one of those is essential. People have actually lived and built great societies for millennia without them. It remains to be seen if a great society can even be maintained with them.

Communications and information are two vastly overrated commodities. Both require modifiers -- essential communication and useful or entertaining information. If you own a few stocks it is not necessary for you to check the prices of those stocks every 30 minutes. If you have ever watched one of those round-the-clock news stations, you soon realize you are getting about 15 minutes of real news repeated 96 times a day.

And do you really need an hourly check on the weather when you know very well that, in most locations, weather is predictable by the season?

From now until at least September, where I live the weather report will be partly cloudy with scattered afternoon and evening thunderstorms with highs in the 90s and lows in the 70s. The only exception will be the appearance of a tropical storm, should one arise and drift in this direction.

Do you really need to enroll your children in so many organized activities -- activities that preclude participation of the parents except as fund-raisers and cab drivers?

I'm admittedly old-fashioned, but I believe that children need lots of free time to develop their imaginations and resourcefulness. Of course, I've been an anti-organization person since the age of 11 when some dope at a YMCA said I could neither play in the game nor leave. I left and never went back.

As for news, do you really need to know about every accident and crime occurring in faraway places?

Of course not. That's the kind of information that is neither useful nor entertaining except for sick people who enjoy other people's misery.

Do you really need to know trade news about trades you're not in, such as in-house awards and box-office receipts for movies you didn't invest in? Does it really matter to you whom some celebrity is sleeping with, marrying or divorcing? Does it matter to you if today is some performer's birthday?

If it does, get a life.

Life is short, shorter for some than for others, to quote the fictional Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove. When it's ending, what do we want? A pile of assets to be divided between lawyers and the government? Memories of television shows? "What did you do with your life?" God will ask. "Well, I watched a lot of TV."

What's left of American culture is grossly commercial, nearly all of it produced and transmitted by a handful of giant corporations whose executives are greedy and no doubt contemptuous of the consumers of their products.

This huge industry instead of trying to uplift people shoves them down to the level of the street punks and ignoramuses. There is hardly a group of executives in the world more despicable than these guys who finance and produce soul-killing trash.

But there are lots of alternatives. Families can garden, take up wood carving, carpentry, sewing, camping, playing musical instruments, learning a foreign language, get involved with community. When the culture barons tell us to sit and watch, we can just leave.