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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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"Thursday's Fare"

I LOVE The Weather Channel.

That's right -- it's a capital letter kind of love that borders on an obsession.

Omit football in the fall and as far as I'm concerned there is little else worth watching.

My wife thinks I'm nuts.

"How many low pressure systems can you watch in one week?" she recently queried.

"Shhh! Weather Center is just starting -- look at those isobars over Kansas ... Sharon Resultan just said there were some 'J hooks' on the local Doppler radar out of Wichita -- may be a wild ride in the old alley tonight," I replied.

She rolled her eyes in frustration.

"We don't LIVE in Wichita," she responded, and then hesitated, "Oh goodness -- look, I think she's pregnant again ..." This remark was clearly an effort to rekindle our "Sharon Resultan debate" My normal viewing time coincides with Mrs. Resultan's nightly forecast and it wasn't long ago the wife noted the correlation and jokingly asked if I was watching the weather or the weather person.

"For heavens sake," I replied," she gives a good weather forecast!"

Not that I don't prefer her presentation to Jim Cantori's.

"How many children has she had?" she asked.

"Three," I responded, "About the same ages as ours -- except Jane. She didn't have one when we had Jane. If we're ever in Atlanta we'll have to look them up."

She rolled her eyes even more this time.

"You HAVE been watching too much," she said in exasperation.

Maybe so. But if you're going to watch too much of anything in Roanoke, Channel 17's the place to be. A pregnant weather forecaster is about as close to anything controversial as you're going to get.

It's a pretty stark contrast to the balance of the fare offered in TV land these days.

Between the pornography so often served up by movie channels like HBO and the never-ending stream of violence that is the staple of the networks and the so called "superstations," television offers a daily meal that is anything but healthy. You might say there are a lot of "fat grams" in the diet -- and in this case they lead to a hardening of both the heart and the mind.

Unfortunately it is our children that most often sit down at the banquet table that is modern day cable and satellite television, and it is they that absorb the vast majority of its rancid offering.

In his book, "Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment," former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow states that, " by the time most Americans are 18 years old, they have spent more time watching television than they have spent in school."

That's an AVERAGE of 3-1/2 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Perhaps a more disturbing fact is that according to the American Psychological Association, '"the typical American child will witness 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of televised violence in his lifetime."

Eight thousand murders?

If you had taken the leading psychologists of the 1940s and '50s and asked them what they thought the outcome would be of subjecting some poor child to such a fate, I suspect their answers would closely mirror the end product we so often see in our society today.

I think the need for over 100,000 NEW prison cells a year would have been a safe projection.

In reality, the number is 230,162, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

These are some pretty unsettling statistics, but they seem cold and stale as the mainstream of American culture continues to race by all around us so colorful and seemingly vibrant.

Even if we desperately wanted to do something, what could we?

Some guy named Paul wrote a letter about 1,900 years ago to some folks he knew in Rome and in it he stated that he thought it would be a very good idea not to support things that tended to bring others down.

I think he was on to something.

I don't suppose we need to throw all our TVs out the window, but if those of us who cared about such things were to watch only that which lifted others up instead of causing them to stumble, we might start a trend toward better programming or a maybe even a little less watching altogether.

Having a few more moments with our children might not be such a bad thing either.

So bring a little peace to the world: watch The Weather Channel.