Channel Snubbing Kids Turn On To Other Activities During TV-Turnoff Week
The point of National TV-Turnoff Week, said 9-year-old Mariann Major, is “so that you won’t vegetate, and if you watch too much TV you might have to get glasses, and so you don’t become lazy.”
The third-grader and her friends at Windsor Elementary near Cheney celebrated the last day of their TV fast Tuesday.
During a sunny morning recess, Eastern Washington University students led races and old-fashioned games, such as Duck, Duck, Goose. Meanwhile, parents set up for an evening ice cream social and art festival in the gym.
TV-Free America, the sponsoring group in Washington, D.C., estimated 3 million people unplugged their sets and got to know each other better during the second annual event April 24-30.
In the Inland Northwest, schools promoted the idea with newsletters and posters. Spokane’s Jefferson Elementary had a daily prize drawing for students who brought in coupons listing what they did instead of watching TV.
Few schools did as much as Windsor Elementary, where parent volunteer Barb Brock, a recreation management professor at EWU, planned activities. She organized a teddy-bear story night, poster contest and distributed information to classes.
Nine-year-old Nick Gaddy’s family turned off two TVs and borrowed an old record player from the school. “We listened to records,” he said. “The big, black ones.”
Americans watch four hours of TV daily and rent twice as many videotapes as they check out library books, according to TV-Free America.
A week without the tube appeals to people throughout the political spectrum, said founder and executive director Henry Labalme, 34.
“We’ve got the political left and the political right,” Labalme said. “We say turn off the TV for your own reasons: because there’s too much sex and violence, because it leads to couch potato-ness, which is a health issue, or because people aren’t going to church and losing touch with spirituality.”
The project is endorsed by the American Medical Association, Literacy Volunteers of America, the Children’s Defense Fund and other groups.
“We’ve even got the pope,” Labalme said.
Pope John Paul II called upon Catholics to give up TV during the 40 days of Lent during his March 10 address in St. Peter’s Square. TV-Free America proposed a TV fast to the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops in January 1995.
Labalme hatched TV-Free America with his friend Matt Pawa when the two were Georgetown housemates in their 20s. Their long conversations about the decline of literacy, the rise in consumerism and the degradation of the environment kept coming back to television.
They knew TV boycotts were happening around the country. They decided to try to harness that energy into a national non-profit group.
First Pawa, then Labalme, took time out from their jobs. Labalme eventually quit his job with an environmental engineering company.
“The most difficult step is the first one,” he said. “Once you commit to it, the rest falls into place.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo