I can’t imagine that it does, but almost every sickbed experience is swamped by TV. (If you can call being in the presence of a TV a part of “experience.”) Hospitals are filled with TVs. I tell ya, it’s weird to visit a sick person and talk with them and join them in their TV state. One asks questions in a daze and gets answers in a haze until someone turns the TV off. Probably doctors sometimes have one eye on the game when they’re talking to a patient (who’s only half-hearing them). Something seems not conducive to rest or healing about it all. Sure, sick people turn TVs off when they’re tired. But one’s system is *essentially* tired when one is sick. One needs rest the whole time in every way that one can muster. Yet there’s an interior aspect that needs to be active when one is sick—the rebuilding process is working overtime. We need to optimize for that as we rest. It’s tricky. But TV requires and provokes an interior passivity and could give a rat’s ass if you’re sick. It probably works better, sells harder, when you’re weak—it wants you sick. It’s *commercial*, for crying out loud—even the public TV. But what can business have to do with recovery? Something seems sick about all the noisy blue flickering tubes by the sickbeds of our troubled nation.
While I’m ranting… It’s kinda like how cars today probably form actual parts of many modern personalities. These people are cyborgs in a sense. I mean, what happens to people when they spend hours a week zooming on and off complicated freeway ramps and interchanges? What does zipping along curving, lofting or even straight grey pavement do to us? We’re talking on cellphones, “being ourselves” all while we’re hurtling along at 50-80 miles an hour, tucked in metal coccoons, at risk of being splattered every moment. I suspect we’re not only ourselves with such lifestyles but are also part car—at any rate, velocity and being nestled in with noise and speed seem likely to be somehow part of who we are now. Just like the TV is part of today’s healing process. Is any of this fully appreciated?
