We never watch early evening TV. No television news. No blast-from-the-past reruns during the 7 p.m. - 8 p.m. hour. (I've done that hour before, and it may have been the death of my last relationship, when day after day my girlfriend and I ate dinner in front of the television.) The kids watch some Barney or Caillou, but the TV isn't regularly on while they're awake. But what's the early evening without some kind of media?
Instead of TV, what we have on from 5 to 7 every day is NPR. I feel guilty a lot about this, but we can't seem to break the habit. The radio, filled with sounds of gun shots and descriptions of torturous kidnappings, of beheadings and assassinations, of endless war, is the background of our lives with our kids. We think, the radio can't possibly have the insidious effect of TV. But BB, to this day, feels the wind blow a little hard and thinks of New Orleans flooding. Who knows what images he has in his mind, because his whole relation to the hurricane was through sounds rather than images. Maybe television would be better, whose images both excite our deep-seated emotions and dull our sensibilities.
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