Only on Television

Too often we hear stories of individuals who commit acts that end in tragedy and blame their misfortune on emulating an event they saw on television.

I had witnessed a near tragedy as a young child, and wanted to keep my young daughter, Elizabeth, from succumbing to the temptation of copying dangerous behavior she saw on television.

Before I was six, several of us were playing a game of cowboy on our street. Just like in Gunsmoke and the other shows I grew up watching, we had a bad guy who needed to be hung for justice to be served. Fortunately, the boy was able to catch a leg on a tree limb and his mother frantically rushed into the yard to extract him from the amateur noose. Everyone was ok, but there were no more realistic expressions of cowboy violence in our games.

It is especially important since the movie, Forrest Gump, came out in the mid-1990’s to view pictures with discrimination, because in that movie images were modified by computer to create unreal scenes. The adage we learned as children to believe nothing of what you hear, and half of what you see had to be amended to verify both for their truthfulness.

Because of my experience, and the stories I heard of less fortunate others I began a prevention campaign.

As we watched different shows, I would look for special effects and doctored activities that weren’t real. Each time I discovered one, I would tell Elizabeth, “That’s only on television.”

A character would have a mind numbing auto accident, and walk away from the wreckage. “That’s only on television”, I would invoke. Superman would leap off a building and fly into the sky. “That’s only on television.” In the Spy Kids movie series, the children do phenomenal things. “That’s only in the movies.”

Since I began when she was very young, I didn’t know for a long time if my efforts had made any impact. Then one day out of the blue, she piped up, “That’s only on TV”, when an unbelievable scene unfolded on the screen.

Forgetting what we were watching, I knew that the message had been received, and that she was observing programs against a baseline of what was real and what wasn’t.

While she still isn’t completely knowledgeable, she has a good foundation from which to differentiate things that appear to be real, and those that are real. She will need to continuously hone that skill as the line between unreal things that appear real, and real things that appear unreal becomes less and less clear.

© 2006 Richard V. Battle