WORSHIP OF TELEVISION

Television is just a means of communication. For communication process to take place a few components are required: the source/ sender, the message, the means, the receiver. One couldn't go more wrong than dumping blame on the mere means. The remaining ones, though, deserve more attention.

It's probably more likely to be due to things like lack of affordable health care and the fact that being not wealthy and not having the "right" kind of job and the "right" kind of house and "right" kind of life means that people are not treated with respect anymore, but just as "losers".

Back in the "old days", people who were poor "knew" they were poor because of a combination of bad luck and because that's where God put them in the scheme of things. Nowdays, bad luck is not really taken into consideration and few people believe that people's places in the world depend on God, so any "lack" or "success" is seen as their own fault and they are then labelled "losers". If this is how people feel 24 hours a day, then it's no wonder mental problems abound.

Read "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton - it's a BRILLIANT book and explains such things in a very readable fashion.

Kim...

WORSHIP OF TELEVISION

The religion of millions of Americans is the Almighty Dollar; their god is greed; their temple of worship the television monitor sitting in the center of family affairs, like an idol being adored and venerated for hours at a time, its commands being obeyed, its lies and deceptions being absorbed just as its fictions manipulate human brains, rewiring minds and conceptions of a real world that will never attain the perfection seen on the monitor, sending reality spiraling into the vortex of psychological confusion and mental unhappiness.

A large and authoritative study, just published in �the Journal of the American Medical Association� confirms that there is more mental illness and insanity, far more, in America than you find in other advanced societies.

The study led by a Harvard Medical School researcher, found evidence of mental problems in 26.4% of people in the United States, versus, for example, 8.2% of people in Italy, Serbia 23%, Croatia 21.8 %, Bosnia 2.9%, Germany 8.1%, Islamic world 3.2%, etc. The researchers were concerned with matters such as lack of access to treatment and under-treatment, but for those concerned about a safe and decent world, I think the salient finding is simply America's high percentage. The world is being led by a nation where more than one-quarter of the people have genuine mental problems.