a great f*ing editorial

SEVERAL YEARS back, I went to Maui to spend a few days with my brother and soak up some midwinter sun.
He had moved to Maui from the Midwest two decades ago, he said, and since then, he had left the island paradise only a handful of times.

Coming from icy New England, I couldn't help feel a pang of envy.

Are you a surfer, I asked?
No.
A sailor?
No.
A snorkeler?
No.
Well, you must love the water, anyway, I said.
Not really.
So what do you do to pass the time, I asked?

"I used to watch a lot of cable TV," he said. "But now I'm on the Internet quite a bit."
And not just as an idle browser. He frequently posted under a nom de plume on a leading conservative site, whose readers, if you run afoul of their cherished tenets, will take you to task in the sort of language an 18th-century squire might have employed in challenging you to a duel. Yet I would count that transition from passive TV viewer to active Web poster as distinct progress.
He - and his pre-Internet years as tropical-climate couch potato - came to mind recently as I read about the hardships the television writers' strike could visit upon us.

As I understand it, if the strikes drags on, our cultural swamp may become an arid national desert. Things could get so bad that, once the current shows have run their pre-scripted course, a crop of (previously produced) marginal offerings may sprout up like weeds to replace them.

I can't imagine how we'll endure.
Or how we'll tell the difference.

The one show my wife and I watch with some regularity is "Grey's Anatomy," in which young surgical interns assist with the occasional high-risk operation in between the frantic pursuit of their sex lives.

Epic drama? Hardly. Rather, it's a silly Thursday night diversion.
But when I sometimes scan the channels at other times, aside from news, the only things I find myself settling on for more than a couple of minutes are wildlife shows like Animal Planet's "Meerkat Manor." The adventures of those furry little beasts are far more captivating than any human reality TV show I've sampled.

That's why I'm continually amazed at the statistics about the long hours the average American spends watching TV. A new National Endowment for the Arts study pegs it at 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day for the average person between the ages of 15 and 24, compared with a paltry seven minutes spent reading.

When I see those statistics, I always silently thank my father for breaking my siblings and me of our TV habit when we were young. One day when I was 6 or 7, our television gave up the ghost. Fed up with the time we were spending in front of the set, my dad, a devoted reader, decided not to replace it.

Life without TV, and particularly "Lost in Space," seemed almost unthinkable. Yet my father was confident we would survive, and time proved him right. We eventually came to see that there's very little on TV that can compare with the pleasures of a good book, or time devoted to a hobby, or stimulating conversation or doing something active.

Over the years, my wife and I have entertained loads of friends and their children at our cottage in Maine, where the tiny TV is only for can't-be-missed news events. Camp is for swimming and canoeing and boating during the day, for board games or cribbage or conversation at night. That's a change for some kids, but just as it did for us all those years ago, the allure of TV soon fades in the face of something more active and engaging.

Keep it off, and you almost forget it's there. I was on leave from July to October, and save for General David Petraeus's congressional testimony and a presidential debate or two, I doubt I saw 10 minutes of TV the entire time.

And now, the writers' strike is a perfect excuse to kick the habit.

So try it for a week. Or even just for a couple of nights.

Switch the set off. Stop watching. Start living.

Trust me. Or rather, my father. You'll survive.

-Scot Lehigh