EDITORIAL
by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

Junk food is artificially flavoured and coloured, excessively sweetened and highly addictive. It is harmful to physical and mental health and its consumption interferes with or even deprives one of beneficial, healthful nourishment.

Television is an almost precise spiritual equivalent of junk food. The entire content of its programming is unedifying, unnourishing, opposed to sound mental and emotional health and filled with value-training which is diametrically opposed to a sound and healthy society. The life styles and ideals it portrays are artificial, corrupt and undesirable. Moreover, television is highly addictive.

Even cartoons designed especially for children instill uncompassionate, aggressive and violent attitudes which are definitely reflected in children's behaviour in school and at play. It has been repeatedly demonstrated, by University of British Columbia studies, and by several studies and commissions in the United States and Europe, that television viewing imparts negative ideals and behaviour patterns to young people, and that children tend to accept the T.V. version of life and behaviour as acceptable norms. In addition, television commercials, which are designed to increase and exploit every human passion, are very popular with children. It has been shown repeatedly that television advertisements have a powerful residual effect not only on the impressionable minds of children, but on adults as well. These advertisements do succeed in initiating, building, strengthening and then exploiting the passions of every sort.

If one carefully examines the moral content of television programs, including that of children's cartoons and the commercials, one will see that they are precisely the opposite of Orthodox Christian ideals. Having contemplated this, stop and compare the number of hours both adults and children spend under the influence of television with the amount of time spent in church, prayer and the reading of the Divine Scripture and other spiritually edifying books. Thus, the heavy influence of Satan and his ideals in the lives of our children begins at a very early age, and in our very own homes.

This problem is often compounded by the sorrowful fact that many parents who are proud of their colour television set are ashamed of the ikon of our Saviour. The television set is given a place of prominence, almost a place of honour, in our homes, while often there is no ikon corner to be found, and if there are ikons, they are hidden away out of the main room of the house, where they will not "cause any embarrassment". Many parents who will consent to their children spending hours glued to the television set, will not spend so much as ten minutes together with their children praying before the ikons. The Saviour and His saints are embarrassments, not entirely welcome guests, while the liturgy of of the evil-one, served daily on television, is given a place of singular honour in the household. Families which would never think of reading together the life of a saint or from the Scripture, will eat in front of the television, just as pagans shared their feasts with their idols - and often such families even neglect to bless the food before the meal.

Later, the parents of such families will bemoan the moral and spiritual state of their offspring. How often do you read the lives of the saints to your children? How much time does your family spend together at the ikon corner in prayer? How often do your children catch sight of an ikon of the Saviour or the saints in your home? On the other hand, how much time do they spend with violent, aggressive and uncompassionate cartoons? How much time do they spend with loud, aggressive, sensual and immoral anti-heroes on television?

No one is foolish enough to suppose that a physically and mentally healthy child can be raised if his intake of junk food exceeds or even equals that of healthy, natural, beneficial food. Why would someone be so foolish as to suppose that one can raise an emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthy child on spiritual junk food?

Television, like so many of man's inventions, has been consecrated to the demon of greed and envy, and it is manipulated primarily for the purpose of increasing and exploiting every human passion. Even the occasional "decent" program is more than counterbalanced by commercials designed to feed, and to feed on, human passions. Some people have asserted, with good reason, that it is better to have a television set in one's home, where T.V. watching can be controlled, than to have one's children watching television elsewhere, in uncontrolled circumstances. There is considerable truth in this. But stop and consider for yourselves whether your television set takes precedence over your ikon corner, whether T.V. is given a greater position in the lives of your children than is Christ. Are you feeding your children more spiritual nourishment than spiritual junk food? The knowledge that parents must answer before the Judge of All for the manner in which they reared their children ought to be enough to make them pause for serious consideration of this matter, even if parental resolve is too weak to do so.