DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE?

Recently, I started thinking about all the changes that televisions have undergone in my lifetime. When I was a kid, a TV set was tiny compared to the room size ones we have today and initially, the television shows were all in black and white. Imagine that? We had to imagine what the colors were! Finally owning a color TV was like manna from heaven.

Getting the display on screen just right was sometimes a little tricky. Besides the picture rolling at times and having to be adjusted, someone would have to "play" with the rabbit ears to position them in just the right spot to get the best picture possible while someone else strategically positioned would bark out "a little more that way..." If the reception still sucked, many people would wrap bow-like pieces of tinfoil on the ends of the rabbit ears hoping for some magic result. I still have a pair of rabbit ears poked away in a closet just in case of a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion. Now, all I need to do is stock up on food and weapons...oh yeah, and lots of tin foil for the rabbit ears and to make tin foil hats.

Keep in mind, when I was a kid we only had 3 networks...ABC, CBS and NBC. Nowadays, we have hundreds of channels, but many times people complain that they can't find anything to watch. Hey, if you can't find anything on the television, there's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and a slew of other options. Three channels and guess what? I don't remember anyone ever complaining that they couldn't find something to watch except when the channels would sign off late at night. Insomniacs were S.O.L in those days! I don't remember exactly what time sign off was. I know on the weekends we would stay up and watch monster movies on Weird (a local program hosted by Eddie Driscoll) and Outer Limits, but I don't remember exactly when the broadcast "flatline" would occur.

One thing that I always thought was funny was when the ominous question, "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?" was asked every night. I don't remember exactly when or why that stopped. Can you imagine if that was asked on television nowadays?  Today's youth would roll their eyes and say something horribly disrespectful. Back in the day, we might get away with an occasional eyeroll, but most of us knew better than to tell our parents to "fuck off "

Also can you imagine having to walk to the television in order to change the channel? How undignified is that? Parents claimed that's what having children were for...that and doing dishes or any other menial household chores that they had grown weary of doing. They claimed it taught us responsibility. I'll have to ponder that one another few decades! The only thing the convenience of having a remote control has done is to enable us to become lazier and less motivated. Channel surfing wasn't done back in the Stone Age because having three channels didn't require much surfing. One! Two! Three! Presto! You're back to the beginning.

I just looked at the first picture I posted and two things immediately jumped out at me...my mother should have been horse-whipped for cutting my hair short and perming it (what the hell was she thinking) and she had horrible taste in décor. I guess I could look at it like this...I was fashion forward! I wore an afro long before they were in style and her decorating style was eclectic. Phew! That takes the sting completely out of looking at that picture.