Once upon a time, we sat around our radios and listened to the news and wonderful radio serials, variety shows. In my house, the big, wood cabinet radio stood tall on its own legs in the dining room, and we drew chairs around it to listen. I learned to sew, embroider and knit during those nights. There were two or three knobs. On/Off, tuning and volume. There was news, serials and variety shows from which to pick, and there was nothing better than listening to a The Green Hornet, Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, snug in your bed, in the dark.
In 1948, my father and Uncle Joe carried our first television set into the living room, huffing and puffing. The screen measured 7 inches on the diagonal. Broadcast in black and white, I watched cartoons, Howdy Doody and westerns, and my grandmother and my father watched the Saturday night fights. Sundays we watched "The Big Top" and the variety shows in black and white.
These programs came by way of radio waves via an antenna attached to our roof. We gauged how well a family was doing by the sprouting of a television antenna.
We watched what we wanted, when we wanted to.
Then we were promised something new and exciting. Cable television was this huge idea in which you could watch hundreds of programs with no interruptions from commercials. So we fell for the scheme. We took down our antennas - our free pass to the airwaves. Then I remember that cable tv couldn't thrive unless commercials were shown, and we couldn't bear the thought of not having our hundreds of programs, so we said to the FCC it was fine with us.
And so now we were paying to have what the FCC wanted us to see and hear, and we would purchase what Park Avenue wanted us to purchase. They would control what we ate, how we smelled, how we pursued our daily lives, our vehicles, our health, our children and our fate.
And now we have no choice. No television for us naughty children, because after taking over the airwaves and forcing us to pay dearly for the service and for high tech televisions, we are not able to wean ourselves from it. We have no antennas! They won't work.
So big business and government have usurped our freedom to hear from what is delivered through a natural phenomenon - airwaves by mandating that no television reception would be delivered to any digitized HDTV, even if we put antennas up.
And we let it happen. And we pay for the pleasure of mind control. And now we are being surveilled...from television sets, from computers and surveilled in the streets, and in stores, hospitals, banks...the list is mind boggling.
Can you tell me why this has happened? Can you tell me why we allowed it?
When we turn on cable tv today, with what are we bombarded?
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