Television Is the New Daniel
I love the television shows from the70’s and 80’s. This morning I woke up to an episode of Highway to Heaven, the old show starring Michael Landen. Going there takes me all the way back to my first decade on the planet. I had such a crush on Patrick Duffy in The Man from Atlantis, and Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man that I would go to bed early just so I could dream about marrying them. Not both of course, but either one was suitable. Something about those shows created a space for my young mind to fantasize and imagine what a world would be like where they could replace body parts with electronic ones, angels came in human form, and the story of Atlantis was no longer a mystery.
Utopia
Living in the future is not as interesting as fantasizing about it. In those old shows the idea was that the more we understood how much power we have and what we could accomplish, the more peaceful we would get. Ultimately living in a utopia where we all coexisted in joy and acceptance side by side. Another fascinating morsel about those shows is how slow they were by comparison to today’s line up. Dialogue centric and plenty of pauses that gave the viewer time to empathize with the characters. Now so much content on the airwaves is reality based and fast moving that our brains now enjoy and need the drone in the back ground. I even know people who actually watch two shows simultaneously so that boredom doesn’t set in. It is amazing to think that so much of what was prophesied in those shows has come true. A Bionic man is common place.
The Insatiable Human Spirit
Evidently conflict, struggle, and suffering are really more interesting than peacefulness will ever be. From the looks of our culture, it seems the general consensus. The wars keep getting bigger. The crimes more brutal, the pundits meaner, the greedy are definitely greedier. We all talk about a million dollars like it is easily within reach. So, really what’s the problem? None of these things are ever going to satisfy us. I guess it will be when we are willing to endure the boredom of self-acceptance and contentment, and we don’t care what other people think. Maybe that’s when peace will set in.
