IT WAS A CRISP DAY in Crestwood, 20 miles north of New York City. In my ninth month of pregnancy, I could do nothing but waddle. That morning, I had waddled my way to chapel for morning prayers. After the service, I trudged up the hill under a denim sky, so blue and fresh my eyes watered. Breathless, I made it up the flight of steps to my apart- ment and collapsed on the sofa. Then I called my mom.
“Jenny,” she said. “You’ve got to get to a television.” My first thought: she’s still on that TV crusade. Why can’t she leave it alone?
That was Sept. 11, 2001. I did eventually find a friend with a television so I could watch footage of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center, followed by the thunderous collapse of the Twin Towers, its fragments showering the city like so many grains of sand. Smoke, screaming, and then silence itself broke open to swal- low the waves of resounding loss.
I will never forget the tremors those images sent through my body as I watched the morning unfold on the tele- vision screen. When the Pentagon burst into flames, I felt mild contractions take hold. “The world is coming to an end, and I’m having a baby,” I thought.
One odd memory is spliced between the more painful ones: the great hunt for a working television. Although I live in a tightly knit seminary community with many people my age, most of my close friends do not own televisions. Two years have passed, and we still lack rabbit ears. My young family now lives in Chicago, and the trend continues: few of my friends are tuned in. Those of us who have intentionally created a television-sized hole in our lives are often victims of the misguided generosity of family members. In eight years of marriage, my husband and I have turned down three free televisions. Friends tell similar tales. A neighbor ges- tures toward a darkened TV crouched in her fireplace. “My mom gave this to me, and I don’t like it.”
Generation X lingers at the end of the alphabet—restless, savvy, wary, yearning, zealous. And a small but growing group of us are troubled by the shifting generational tectonics. The same grandparents and parents who lamented our “Sesame Street”-induced comas, pleading with us to get off the sofa and play outdoors, are now concerned about our sans-television existences.
“You must feel lost without a television,” my husband’s grandmother tells us. When my father-in-law comes to visit, he brings toddler-friendly videos for our daughter. Another relative gently rea- sons, “You and John may be fine without a television, but what about Anna?”
My mother, of course, makes the most compelling argument. “How will you keep up with what’s going on in the world?” She has a point. On Sept. 11, live television allowed me to gasp, weep, and pray with the rest of the world. But as I said before, my generation is inherently skeptical—especially about television news. If we watch the news, we don’t believe that we are getting the full story. In charitable moments, we allow that it might be based on fact.
This article was originally published in The American Conservative – link.
