Walking The Beat

Almost everyone who watches TV at all watches reality shows, from The Bachelor to Project Runway to the Kardashians. Not to mention Hoarders and almost anything on HGTV. But the most popular reality show ever was Survival. Do you know that about 51 million people watched the last episode? It beat that year's Superbowl.

Roger Rosenblatt, one of my favorite essayists on PBS’ News Hour, was absolutely scathing about the show. He described it as “imitation reality for people who have nothing better to do with their lives” or something like that. And I found myself nodding in agreement - after all, wasn’t I one of the ones with too much taste to waste my time on such nonsense?

But then I realized that my own fondness for murder mysteries might be characterized in a similar fashion, although of course I don’t like to think of it that way.

But it got me thinking. We all have hobbies, don’t we? Americans spend more money on leisure time activities than just about any other people in history. Everyone has their favorite TV shows, authors, sports teams, get-away places.... But when do these things become too important?

Relaxation and recreation are good, but when does relaxation become escape? When does recreation move from being a break from reality to a substitute for it?

I know, I know - most of you are absolutely inundated with reality, especially those of you with children. If you do have time to sit down with a book or a TV show you don’t have the energy to care one way or another who wins, it’s enough not to have to clean up after them. During my two weeks with my godchildren, we spent most of our time building, cleaning, sorting, buying, making, cooking, teaching... Even our recreation was child-focused, and definitely had purpose and meaning... If you exercise their socks off, they’re happier and healthier and get into a whole lot less trouble.

But for far too many people, entertainment has become a substitute for reality. And it is my opinion that there are two forces in our society at work in this addiction.

The first force behind our addiction to entertainment is prosperity. When we don’t have to scratch out our very survival on an hour-to-hour basis, like subsistence farmers or sweat-shop employees in the third world, we need to fill the time with other things. Food, shelter, clothing... Once these are taken care of, we move on to meeting more complex needs, needs for relationship, for accomplishment, for meaning. And our society has made it very difficult, over the past few generations, to get a handle on how to meet those needs. Having jettisoned our dependence on God, the substitute routes to “the good life” trumpeted by politicians, sociologists, and the media have proved to be dead ends. And so too many people have given up, and anesthetize themselves against life’s disappointments with substitutes...

Both TV and the Internet have eroded - if not completely replaced - the relationships we used to have with our civic institutions, from sewing bees to town hall meetings. Sociologist Robert Putnam wrote about the subsequent loss of community very persuasively in his book Bowling Alone. Americans are personally connected in a long-term, satisfying way with fewer and fewer people. We have drive-by relationships. And that loss of connectedness, the social isolation too many people live in, contributes in a powerful way to the second force powering our entertainment addiction.

That second force is a sense of meaninglessness, of powerlessness. That’s why so few people watched the conventions and why the number of people voting every year goes down. And the less connected we are to our leaders, people who are supposed to listen to us, to care about what we think and want, the more powerless we feel, and the more time we spend feeding our emptiness with imitation reality.

Well, what has this got to do with Ezekiel 33?

God had appointed Ezekiel to be a prophet to the exiles in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem. They weren’t treated as badly as had their cousins in the northern kingdom, sold into slavery by Assyria over a hundred years before, but it still wasn’t any walk in the park. Many of the exiles had simply picked up their families and businesses and took up where they had left off. But others had lost everything: friends, families and future. Their whole way of life had been shattered. And not only did they feel powerless, they were powerless. The problem was that they also felt hopeless.

The reality that they confronted was more than they were equipped to handle. The whole central belief structure of their world had crumbled. And although this is not the situation that we face here in 21st century America, it is not so far off, not so alien to us as we might imagine. The generation that grew up in Europe at the close of the 19th century saw a similar collapse of their world. Their belief in the progress and perfectibility of humankind was buried in the trenches of the Somme. That “Lost” generation found its answer, its escape, in existentialism.