It’s five o’clock. Time to watch the local TV news. But my body refuses to rise out of my easy chair.
I realize I don’t want to watch the news. Any news.
We have only one TV channel here in the Okanagan. Everything else comes from outside: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto…And from dozens of U.S. cities. Over 500 channels available.
But only one local news channel whose one-hour program depends heavily on video of fires, accidents, and sports highlights. It’s followed by half an hour of the Global Network’s national news, which depends heavily on war footage, mass shootings, and talking heads trying to convince us that they’ve been right all along. Then a half-hour repeat of the juiciest bits of the earlier hour of local fires, accidents, and sports.
Somehow, this isn’t the world I wanted to retire into.
An insurance company used to promote “Freedom 55.” It sold the notion that by investing with them, I could retire at 55 to something resembling Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. With someone much younger than me. Who mixes excellent Margaritas.
Freedom 55 has been replaced by Reverse Mortgages. So that when I die — which I will, inevitably — I can leave less to my family.
Assuming that all of us haven’t been bombed, shot, burned, frozen, scorched, drowned, or suffocated by then.
TV news just doesn’t appeal to me anymore. After yet another mass shooting in the U.S., I got so turned off guns that I resolved not to watch any program that culminates in a shoot-out.
That cuts my viewing options by at least 50 per cent.
It leaves me mostly with programs on public service channels: CBC across Canada, Knowledge Network here in B.C., PBS in the U.S….
The Brits, somehow, manage to create lively, entertaining, and even funny murder mysteries that don’t conclude with a shoot-out: Death in Paradise, Vera, Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, Midsomer Murders…Australia and New Zealand do the same with Miss Fisher, Brokenwood, Dr. Blake… Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries sets a standard for literacy and historical research — along with convoluted plots.
But in a sense, all of these are escapism. They take me to a world where people are generally decent to each other. Where criminals let themselves be handcuffed without struggle. They commit murders,true – but they’re nice about it.
Doc Martin can even be rude nicely.
It’s not the world I see on the nightly news. Maybe it’s a world that never existed, except in my imagination.
I’m tired of seeing emaciated children die of starvation. Of seeing people heaving rubble aside with their bare hands to rescued buried relatives. Of watching political leaders malign each other, with no indication they’ve ever actually talked with the other person. Of hearing about corporate CEOs getting a multi-million bonus for laying off thousands of staff. And of corporations raking in record profits while making the planet less livable.
I don’t like it. And I’m slowly realizing I don’t have to like it.
Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe I’m just pulling the covers up over my head, hoping that the monster under the mattress will go away. Maybe I’m guilty of escapism.
Regardless, I’m voting with my “off” button.
Jim Taylor lives in Lake Country: rewrite@shaw.ca