ABC really depressed me last night. I just wanted to catch up on some shows I had missed, and wound up in the middle of a mixed up collection of people on television who did not in any way lift my spirits.
It started with Wife Swap, which always has featured two families who may not necessarily inspire the world but can at least help each other see the error of their ways when it comes to their daily lives. One family was obsessed with activities and aesthetics, while the other was blended and more laid back. I couldn’t identify with either of them. I may not be the perfect human body, but I don’t let it all go to pot either. The mother of the perfectionist family had skin that, in the words of the swap family’s husband, looked like saddle leather for all the tanning she did. She used her experience with counseling to overburden her kids and keep them overprotected by making them ride in booster seats in the car simply because they hadn’t made the car safety watchdogs’ minimum weight requirement for not needing them anymore. So the measurement of being “grown up” is also a weight as well as a state of being? Or is safety based on adding an accessory to a vehicle instead of making the seat belts match the various requirements of their riders?
Then came Supernanny, which featured a family in which the mother had lost her husband to terminal cancer two weeks prior to taping. The neighborhood came out to support her in raising her infant son and young daughter. It was depressing that cancer is still so rampant in our world. It was depressing that so many neighborhoods are not like the one depicted in the story (many suburban areas’ residents don’t even know who lives next door).
Finally came the segment on children with Tourette’s Syndrome going to a summer camp customized for them. Watching so many afflicted yet resillient children caught up in the noises, gestures and other anomalies manifested by the disease was not helping me wind down prior to bedtime. The one thing that made me feel better was that I didn’t mind that any of these people existed in the same world with me, but frequently in my life I have been accused of being an inconvenience just by existing, and I don’t have over-tanned skin, Tourette’s or a need for intervention.
I kept the program on to see if anybody would explain the reasons behind the human condition. ABC and the other networks never dig into that. They should.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 