Overreacting

(20 February - 5 March 1993) after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I might be overreacting but I won’t have it in my house. I’ll entertain myself; TV won’t divert me. In the modern world, entertainment is watching others having fun, watching others taking risks, increasing our fears of direct experience with images of disasters and deprivations. Having spent our days however we thought we needed to, we spend our evenings not having to think about it, feeling we’re in control, feeling we get more than we give, as we’re passified for a sales job, losing touch with what we really need, cultivating a sloth that drains our minds of poisons that shouldn’t be there, replacing talk, replacing thought. Imagination is a grace exceeding; let it see which soap to buy. Intelligence opens the box to tell us how it works, and then opens the opening to see how to make a new box; let it decide between news babble on ABC and news babble on NBC. Turn on the tube and tune in. You are connected to a world made to please you, a world that replaces the real world. It fills in all the gaps.