I "get" the background and the technological reasons to switch to digital TV and all that. But honestly, how many millions of our tax dollars are being wasted on this "dear god we need to drop everything and help everyone switch because lord knows we can't trust them to handle their own affairs!" game? Seriously. Why should we care? It's only television.

Having to hear every four seconds about how it's going to be some kind of goddamned tragedy because some portion of lazy motherfuckers sitting on a couch somewhere can't be arsed to replace or upgrade their own equipment (or get someone to do it for them!) when we've been listening to the same goddamned twitter about this switch for three fucking years is really wearing thin. Now we're going to have to hear three more years of whining about how the new digital TV is no good, so-and-so can't get such-and-such channel anymore, and woe is me, my reception sucks now. I have a better idea: Why don't we just turn the whole thing the fuck off? I quit watching TV when I was a teenager and honestly, my life hasn't been any less enriched because of it. I have a TV, but it's an old analog one that I use as a monitor for my game consoles. I don't have cable, I don't have a converter box, and I don't even have a damn antenna for the thing. I don't care, and I don't see why anyone else should care enough to be treating this like some kind of disaster.

Way back when this digital switchover was announced in the first place I held the vain hope that some portion of people might wake up and decide to do something else with themselves instead of park in front of their (soon to be useless) TV. Like, I dunno. Read a book. Learn some stuff on the Internet. Go the fuck outside for some reason other than to go to work or to the liquor store. Interact with real people. Learn something about the world.

I don't characterize myself as a very smart person compared to most, and I'm fairly young and therefore am automatically assumed to lack experience. Yet somehow I am continually amazed at the sheer ignorance that many people I meet display about absolutely everything. Science, literature, fiction, history, geography, mechanics, anything. Yet they can recite to me chapter and verse what happened on Survivor or American Idol. The one that gets me is how they can complain to me about the war in Iraq, yet they don't actually know where Iraq is. These are people who are older than me -- people who should be "old enough to know better." Yet the only thing they know about the world is what they see through the damned box at the other end of the living room.

And it pisses me off. These people don't need pampering. Let them flounder. Maybe it'll force them to learn something about the world, even if it's just some tiny inconsequential thing that they need to hook up to get their fucking idiot box working again.