There are times when I dream of watching my television swing to and fro, as seen in this wonderful picture at left.  The frequency of this disenchantment with television seems to be on the rise.  I have cancelled my television service in the past, and I just may do it again — much to the dismay of my children.

Generally speaking, I don’t have much time for television.  Ironically, it is during the busy times of my life that I really enjoy having a fairly substantial television package.  When my schedule is very hectic, it’s nice to have a lot of choices during the one or two hours per week that I can afford the luxury of a little couch time.

Lately however, I have had a little more time than usual to watch television.  I always seem to make time for it this time of year because I am such a huge football fan.  It’s times like these — when I’ve been watching a fair amount of television — that I seriously think about chucking it out the window. This might sound a little extreme, but I truly have reached my limit of smut intake.

I intentionally avoid prime time television.  I don’t watch sitcoms because I don’t find crude humor as funny as I did when I was 13.  I don’t watch crime dramas because there is plenty of violence already in the news.  I don’t watch medical or hospital dramas because I don’t want to see doctors and nurses getting frisky in the broom closet.  And I don’t watch reality television because for me television is all about avoiding reality.  Basically, I watch educational television, a little news, and sports.

Even though I am fairly diligent in my attempts to monitor the purity of the content that I watch, I still feel inundated with horrible commercials.  There is just no avoiding them.  Television networks insist on advertising the next episode of their morally bankrupt series during football games.  The pharmaceutical companies need to show me some guy who needs to take a pill so that he can have lots of fun with his girlfriend — and the only thing that anyone is worried about is that his “condition” may last for more than four hours.

The worst offense, which I have just recently noticed, is so surreal that I nearly can’t believe it.  Last night, while watching the more “conservative” news channel, I had to watch a commercial (multiple times) about a service that helps you find someone with whom to cheat on your significant other.  I’m not going to dignify the service’s name by typing it, but if you’ve seen it you surely know to what I am referring.

I have decided that this is probably all that I can take.  I don’t want to completely unplug from reality and avoid the world entirely, but this filth is doing nothing positive for me.  While I would certainly miss things like EWTN, I can watch online.  I can catch up on the news online, and I can listen to sports via the Internet or traditional radio.  I do believe that I’ll unplug all my satellite paraphenalia, and reserve my television for viewing movies — movies that I have pre-screened via sites such as the USCCB movie review site.

Life is difficult enough for a 30-something man.  Temptations abound.  Television is just one source, but it’s the one most quickly elimintated.  In this economy, surely there are better things on which I can spend my money.  I think it’s time to find out.