Friday, January 27, 2017

#1937 Clean Up the Talking Boxes


#1937

Clean Up the Talking Boxes



And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.  (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12)

Youth is a gift of nature; old age is a work of art.  I used to think that youth was such a waste, so much to learn.  And now, youth in the rear view mirror, old age with its struggles through the windshield, is not a time for daredevils or sissies. 

My mother's parents lived in the house in which she and her siblings were born, the house in which her father and his siblings were born, the house in which his father and siblings were born: a large frame plantation type house, biggest in the community, the type as in all old southern houses, at one time, the kitchen built away from the house, still standing and still in use, a house which survived the Civil War.  The light switch-refrigerator-electric stove were still miracles to my grandmother who had lived most of her life before electric power lines came into the community.  After my grandfather's death, a lady was brought in to care for my grandmother and one family member thinking that she should be "enlightened" brought in for my grandmother's enjoyment a television set (talking box).  So, all of a sudden, people in a box talking to her, she would talk back and wave at them, staggered that they would not talk back or respond to her.  Such is the bottomless ocean of technology that has enshrouded our lives just during my lifetime, eighty-six years.  I still cannot understand the impersonal attitude of the woman who talks to me on my cell phone and she says such "curt" things to me "I did not understand what you said" or "I am here to serve".  (Is there really a little woman in this cell phone I hold, is everyone in the world, even children, talking to someone in their little phone?)  What will life be like at the schoolhouse, courthouse, or your house when robots are doing most of the menial labors or even complicated things that a complex world demands?

My father's parents owned one of the first radio's in the community, if you could hear anything above the static.  But, they did listen to FDR's fireside chats, etc.  And this writer became totally addicted to the radio, "The Lone Ranger", "Portia Faces Life", etc.  The first exposure for most country folks to modern technology, after power lines arrived, a movie shown in town on outside on the side of a building.  The first time I ever saw a movie inside a theater was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".  The first TV set I ever saw, 1948, was when I was a freshman at UNC-CH, in the store window of a furniture store.  I finally owned one, a large cabinet with a very small screen, just a few inches...everything black and white.  If you want today's psychological problems solved with young people...their lack of manners, their slang, their laziness, their dissatisfaction with everything (real or imagined), CHILDREN WITH TOO MUCH TOO SOON.  Young people never knew the talking box when it was on just during the hours of six to midnight, the large peacock.  People went to bed, did not stay up all night watching trash, audiences snickering at sexual innuendo, "supposed entertainers".

Yesterday, Mary Tyler Moore died at age eighty.  Like so many of the early TV shows, she entertained people with a clean, hilarious program.  If our young people could only have seen early TV shows such as Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, or even the Ed Sullivan show.  If our young people could only have heard early radio shows such as "Fibber McGee", "The Great Guilder Sleeve", "Lum and Abner", "Major Bowes Amateur Hour", "Henry Aldridge" ("Coming Mother"), etc.  They were clean-decent-acceptable in most homes.

This old man has many warts and stains from sin (B.C. - before Christ) but, I am astonished at today's acceptable language heard on radio and TV, which at one time, one only heard in an Army barracks, which now goes out over cyberspace.  I well remember while a student in Memphis, TN, fifty years ago, a young announcer in a minute of exasperation used a four letter word which got him kicked off-job lost.  A word which now can be heard on any street corner anywhere...television was such a wonderful source of entertainment, especially for those whose lives had been so entertainment free.  From the tallest building in most cities, to the creeks in the most impoverished farmlands, the same entertainment, NOW IN EVERYONE'S HOME, if, they had the television reception...and most found the means to have it.  I saw small shacks in the countryside with a television antenna on top, which you would think would not support a nice size cat or bird, but all these people enjoyed television and they sat on their "roosts" like chickens for free entertainment.  It moved many of them onto the welfare rolls.

Most, thank God, used entertainment like other forms of indolence and care.  My Aunt Mamie, who owned a television set, would have all of her neighbors into her house to watch "I Love Lucy".  These people, who had done nothing but survived by the undercoatings of living via hard work, finally had something to enjoy, finally could hear one another laugh, and finally could have some joy in a world of troubles-struggles.  And, for the most part, it was clean entertainment.  For the most part, after other stations were added in addition to the big three, CBS, NBC, ABC, one could travel the world and see the sights which only a few of us had been able to see by actually going there.  With equality, those with eyesight could view the great pyramids in Egypt, which sit at the exact landmass center of the Earth, could see the pyramids in the Yucatan, the glaciers of the poles, the frigid ice of Siberia, and the heated sand of the Sahara...SUCH A SOURCE OF EDUCATION. 

But, as was the case in Heaven when one third of the angels got kicked out by God, along with the Devil, Satan gets involved in everything.  And, like pornography in the backstreet bookstores, peep shows, pornography was moved into your living room.  And, when enough parents, preachers, physicians got concerned about the pollution of your children's minds; much of television was cleaned up.  But, Satan never gives up...always on the job.  He moved right into your living room, a smaller box that didn't talk as loudly, that not only had a snare but a net (internet).  So absolutely-fantastically educational that every home-business-student must have one...the computer, they were made more acceptable by calling them fruit names such as Apple and Macintosh.  With such obviously innocent characters as a "mouse", this sightless veteran has never seen one, cannot use one.  The computer has taken over the world, from the nuclear silos to the restaurant kitchen...all life revolves around the computer...all of Wal-Mart's inventory,  all of Planned Parenthood's fetal tissue abortion results. 

The computer, like television, has become more addictive than opium, more time consuming than eating.  And, at a time when children watch television four hours each day, old folks watch television seven hours each day.  How addictive soap operas became.  One of my long time church friends was in a nursing home, many health problems; she was too old-too broke for her pastor or church friends to visit her anymore.  She had no money, treasure, talent, or time to give them.  I asked a woman preacher, who I knew, to go and visit her.  When she went, my friend said to her, "I don't have time to see you; I have to watch my story."  Out in the country, country church, one of my mother's friends asked the people at prayer meeting to pray for one of the soap opera characters who had gone to the hospital.  This is how real Satan has made sin such a pushover to everyone-every age-every economic strata.  Technology has become so real; this writer has made eight trips around the world, every continent including both poles, passport stamped in 157 countries.  I have smelled poor sanitation, witnessed filth, particularly in Godless communist countries.  My first trip to Communist China, I would not touch anything in the room without cleaning it...filth everywhere.  In Burma, you could smell the toilets in airports from a long distance; this is what happens when uncleanness, lack of sanitation, a sewer mentality takes over a world, a nation, and the people of a nation.  This not healthy or holy, from the beginning God expected us to be holy because he knew this led to physical and mental health.  “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.” (Leviticus 20:26)  Looking back, Peter said, "Be holy because I am holy."  (1 Peter 1:16)

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