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This article is sure to make some of you angry. Some of you may have a right to anger but others should soul search as to the reasons you are reacting so strongly.

Pythagoras, the master mystic long years before the arrival of Christ stated,”All men know what they want, but few know what they need.” This was a time before television or advertisers in the modern sense. Today, Americans are heavily helped to know what they want. The television tells them what they should covet because it is the latest and greatest. If a study was done to determine how much people really needed the things they acquired I bet the results would be amazing. We hoard things we don’t need. And along with all these programmed wants comes a crushing dependency.

If we come to depend on any person, prescription, material object or organization we slowly begin to loose personal power. We become weaker. We have already lost sight of real needs and have become: confused, in debt, anxiety ridden. Next comes the shrink who we become dependant on for advise for just getting along.

America, originally a group of settlers were brave pioneers creating a new world: new ideas, new systems of government. We were dependant on Great Britain for a long time. Our need was great. Yet, if this dependency had continued longer than it did the colonies would have become weaker as Great Britain became stronger.

In the sixties, a writer Eric Fromm warned Americans against the Industrial/Military Complex and their tool, the Mega Machine.(Television) He claimed Americans were being turned into sheep. How many of us depend on the nightly news and believe it? How many of us watch information shows on how to run our lives and our family. Don’t we turn on the television if we learn about a disaster, a pandemic, code yellow for terrorism. It is not wrong to be informed of the world around us. But, it is foolish not to question the source. Blockbuster tragedies make advertisers happy. They can run the tragedy and appropriate commercials into the ground. Was it really that important to see Anna Nicole’s misery paraded across the nightly and daily TV screen? When princess Diana was killed I saw people crying(like they knew her?)that didn’t cry at their mother’s funeral. People became addicted, dependant on both stories to fill the emptiness of their own lives. I knew a woman who spent all her time watching television while getting fatter and fatter. Her husband said she talked about soap opera stars like they were real people not actors. I called her once and her son answered the phone. He said the power had gone out. I asked him, “Where is your mother?” He sighed, “She won’t get out of bed. She can’t watch the television.”