For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
elevision. Your greatest invention since the printing press, yet so crass, shallow, hollow. A sedative, and a poor one
Then, of course, you justly ask what my opinion is worth against a massive, appreciative audience.
Allow yourself a broader view.
The universe is awash with civilizations. Some prolifically simulate and tend (as Gods) even greater, more complex cyber civilizations.
I’ve seen breathtaking nobility, integrity and honor cresting societies older than your moon.
Stateliness, generosity and benevolence grace ancient scattered communities, their home planet a forgotten dream.
Dignity, courtesy, respect and tenderheartedness spring spontaneous from kindred clans inhabiting unbelievably hostile worlds in fearfully unstable systems.
On the other hand, we have paranoid, aggressive, bicameraly stunted affairs such as yours.
Your finest achievements, on a galactic scale, rate you little more than a vicious warlord’s encampment despoiling a sublunary realm - ironically one of the most beautiful encountered, or simulated.
Yet, I agree, my opinion is worth nothing. Merely one of 6500 million equally-worthless takes on life, even if from a mind not of this world. Your healthy independence of thought is desirable, a way forward, a hedge against intellectual atrophy. Keep it so.
But as pioneers you need markers and way posts to benchmark mental and social progress - and judge, if not its direction, at least the very change of it.
It is accepted (in places much further than you from your sun) that "purpose" and "judgment", even as abstract qualities, acquire supreme, god-like substance and entity in communities whose lowest mind set exceeds that of your loftiest.
Not so for you, judging by your Television.
A stochastic of your mind set, your intellect’s inertial indicator, Television (and the media it encompasses) reflects your wildest fantasies, deepest fears and most conservative core values in a collaged multimedia random walk.
Almost fatally lacking perspective, you globalize unnatural cultural values, beaming visions of fat, greedy, selfish, tiny-minded ugly people - figuratively and literally gorging themselves in self-indulgent frenzy and bathing in adulatory hysteria - into countries of sad, dispossessed, starving, dying societies.
Your blind insensitivity sends wanton, violent, sexual, depraved, meaningless self-obsessed trash into countries whose gentile, respectful, pious citizens stare in open-mouthed, shocked disbelief at their now-tarnished silver screens.
Unified by thoughtless arrogance you portray the cruel indifference of a wealthy elite parading unlimited superiority, success, excess, waste and disregard, in media messages rubbing the other ninety-percent’s faces in an implied excremental misfortune of their own making.
Spoils and riches obscenely gained and discarded among the ruling fortunates (aka you; anyone with the means to view this message) stand unattainable to the billions gazing hopelessly at ubiquitous mocking colored screens - almost as if television was invented to contemptuously taunt and goad the poor.
