There is a Calvin and Hobbes comic-strip that I find a little bit amusing. Calvin and Hobbes are discussing what the Karl Marx quote “Religion is the opium of the people” could mean. The final part of the strip shows the TV saying through a thought balloon “It just means that he coulden’t tell the future” referring to TV’s new role as an opium, something to keep you calm. This amazing invention, by the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird, has truly become a way to escape reality and every day routines. Sometimes this is a good way to relax and spend time with your friends, but it can also be a source for distraction. It can be a way to forget about your responsibilities for this poor planet that we live on and our responsibilities for our fellow man. If something comes up on the telly that remind us about the conditions on this planet we simply switch the channel and let the television spoon-feed us with lame reality TV-shows. So we can forget about our own life and our responsibilities and instead discuss other people’s lives. I also believe that the TV is not encouraging your imagination; most of the TV-stations are financed through commercials. And the commercial try to create fear of being different, by telling us what we need to wear and what we need to do to avoid bad breath and fungus diseases. I think that this fear-of-being-different-thing isn’t very creative but rather repressing for the imagination and if there is anything this humanity needs to change direction it is people with imagination. People, who dare to think, forgive me for the cliché, outside the box. “Bread and circuses” is a Roman metaphor for when people don’t care much about freedom or the lives of others as long as they got their food and are entertained. I think that this way of thinking has infected us in the western world, we don’t want to hear about starvation in Africa, we don’t want to take responsibilities for this planet. All we want is entertainment, all the time. And our beloved television can give us that: sugar-coated entertainment. The freak shows, where they exhibited the Elephant man and ladies with beards, to which we gasp at for their cruelty has moved into the tube and are now called documentaries. We can watch everything from sex-maniacs to dog boys and entertain ourselves for a moment or two. I want to finish this little article by quoting the lyrics from one of my favourite bands, Blindside, song which is called Yamkela: “Take me back to TV-land/ numbness is a safe zone/They never trained me for reality/ I am a reality-TV clone”
 The writer is hugging his opium Photo by: Mirjam Söderberg
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