What say you, Meg?

...Have you ever considered switch hitting?

Nope. Never. Not on my worst man day have I ever for one moment considered that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. A person’s sexual preference should be nobody’s business but their own’s. I never even met a lesbian until after I was married, as far as I know.

The first one I met was, ironically enough, right near San Francisco. I was working and another nurse and I went outside to eat on the lawn. For some reason, she just came out and told me that she was a lesbian. My response made her laugh, I said, “Oh really? Can I touch you?” And then I touched her on the forearm. We finished our lunch and we never brought the subject up again, as I said, I was married.

I do get along rather well with most gay men...not sexually of course...I just find that, as a group, they have a great sense of humor. Not always, but often enough for me to have noticed that trend. Years ago, I worked with one gay guy and we both loved to watch Seinfeld. It was still on weekly and we did, literally, talk about it at the water cooler.

I miss that show. It was the last program that actually made me laugh out loud. The original Dick Van Dyke Show and All in the Family are the only other shows that STILL make me laugh, no matter how many times I see them. I anticipate the jokes now and I laugh before they speak the lines. Other shows made me laugh at one time or another but they don’t STILL make me laugh. MASH was good and I laughed at the time...but I also laughed at the Brady Bunch once. The 3 shows that I mentioned are the only shows that can consistently make me laugh. I think Leave it to Beaver and Andy Griffith can do it occasionally, but not as often as the other 3.

I don’t even bother trying to watch network programs anymore. People keep saying, “Oh, you’ll love this show!!!” But I never do. Apparently, they’ve run out of ideas. They just made another “Gilligan’s Island” and I don’t know why. I can think of very few other shows that were the butt of so many jokes, with the possible exception of “My Mother the Car”.

It’s a shame that they can’t come up with any new ideas, heck, American Idol is nothing more than another talent show. We’ve always had some form of talent show, even if it was the Gong Show. The only difference is that now the television show proclaims them to be stars and so they are. They send them from one show to another and then they are celebrities.
That’s a little bit frightening. We have our idol du jour and people who have won a talent show are elevated to some standard that they didn’t actually acchieve. Who’s falling for this stuff?

Earlier I mentioned critical thinking and the fact that it is a dying skill. We should be thinking more than to let the television choose our ideas, much less our idols. I think that most people are smart enough to see through the silliness on television but there are far too many stupid people in the country as you may have noticed. They can be easily manipulated and the TV people know just how to do it.

We should really be careful to whom we apply terms like “idol” and “star”. It belittles the words themselves and then it sets the standards a little bit lower. There isn’t that much to aspire to when winning a singing contest gets you pinned with the term “idol”.

I’d be curious to see what people said when they invented television and if they ever considered the consequences before they put such power into the hands of that little box.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere must have foreseen a dire corollary of some sort. I’m going to go look and see what I can come up with. I’d be interested in any quotes that anyone out there might be able to find that in any way foretold of some sort of moral penalty to be paid in exchange for the power that television could wield.

Meg