Cable TV

In an age of technology every generation remembers something revolutionary that changed their lives.  For my grandparents it was radio.  My parents remember the day their families got their first television.  Gen Xers, we celebrated the arrival of cable television.  I can still clearly recall the day the cable guy finally showed up at my house.  When he left we had a black cable running from the wall to a little black box on top of our TV.  This was no ordinary box.  It was magic.  You pushed a button (yes, button.  Wireless was just a dream then) and presto, a whole new world of entertainment.  HBO was part of the package and my whole neighborhood of pre-teen boys eagerly awaited the weekend, for after midnight the shows we were not supposed to watch came on.  The ones with women with no clothes who were doing things we were just beginning to become obsessed with.  Thanks to HBO for many years I really thought 10 was a good movie.  Ah, Bo Derek, how I miss you.
Cable in those days included MTV (which actually played videos) and Headline News (which actually was news) and TBS (which Ted Turner used to shove the then dismal Dale Murphy and the Atlanta Braves down our throats).  There were maybe 20 channels to choose from.  At the time we thought it was unbelievable.
Cable television did a lot of things for my generation.  It introduced us to new styles of music (hair metal and rap) and the 24 hour news cycle.  It pushed nudity and profanity from the margins to the mainstream of television and our culture.  Cable television gave us an endless stream of reruns and some really fantastic original programming.  And it helped to instill in us the belief that more is better.
Today ESPN alone has more than 20 channels  (still love ESPN 8, The Ocho).  The average cable/satellite package has nearly 200 channels to choose from.  Think about it, in a 24 hour period I can choose from almost 5000 hours of programming.  Obviously there is no way I can watch it all, so God invented Tivo so I could record what I missed and watch it later.  And people talk about the demise of western culture, please!
The thing is, I have noticed that my life is beginning to look alot like cable TV.  I keep adding things under the belief that more is better.  Let me give you an example.  Not too long ago I was employed full-time as a minister, taking a full load of courses for my Ph.D., employed as a part-time Teaching Assistant/Adjunct faculty for the university, had two children, a wife (how do you think I got the two kids) and took care of the cooking, bills, and lawn care at home.  Then I added a part-time gig as a researcher for a history of slavery project.  I tell you this not to brag but to share with you that at the time I did not think such a schedule was a bad things.  After all, life is like cable and more is better (and sleep is so over-rated).
It seems that I am not the only one of my generation who feels this way.  Between work and our families life gets pretty busy.  We rush from here to there and back again, adding more and more activities to our already packed lives.  Thanks to emails and other technology we can Tivo our lives, picking up what we missed from the day later on (or deleting it if we just don't want to deal with it right now.  Remember, there will always be reruns).  But has cable TV lied to us?  Is more really better?  Or is sometimes more just more?  Just because I have access to 200 channels does not mean there is anything worth watching.
We do not have cable or satellite in our house right now.  We gave it up about a year ago.  Not out of some noble gesture, mind you, it just did not fit in the family budget (granted, it was a tough call, feeding the kids or keeping the dish.  Tougher than I thought.  Good thing for my kids that they are so darn cute).  So I watch more DVD's and catch whatever program I really want to see on the Internet.  My wife and I are still very busy, but we have started putting more thought into quality over quantity.  We hope to teach our kids that a full life is not the same as a busy life.  More is not always better, sometimes it is just more.  Because some days, no matter how many channels you have, there is still nothing on.