Save your television!

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat Seth Doria

Driving home the other day, I got stuck at the intersection of Grant and Campbell behind one of those Hippie cars.

By Hippie car, I mean there were bumper stickers covering the back telling me to save mother Earth, stop wearing fur and quit eating meat. There was even a sticker telling me to burn my bra. Usually, I just snicker egotistically at these stickers, thinking it's ironic that someone who wants to save the Earth would toss a cigarette butt out of his or her window, but then I saw the worst sticker of them all.

Kill Your Television.

I hate that sticker.

For years I've been trying to understand why people hate television. Granted, most of what goes on during primetime sitcoms is garbage (damn the man who let "90210" on the air for so many years), but television is the best tool humanity has ever seen for exploring history and keeping up with current events.

How else could you have seen the massacre at Tiananmen Square or Neil Armstrong landing on the moon?

Two weeks ago I was sitting at home flicking through the channels, looking for anything that would entertain me. I happened upon one of the best stations that no one has ever heard of-the History Channel.

There was a documentary on about the raising of the Berlin Wall and its social implications. Amazingly enough, the show included excerpts of a home video shot as people stuck in East Berlin tunneled under the wall to their friends and family in the west.

First off, despite the fact that I have studied history in both high school and college, I had never been told exactly what the Berlin Wall was and how it impacted people.

Second, now that I have seen the expression on an elderly woman's face as she exited a tunnel into freedom and her children's arms, I would have to say I learned something.

Spending that half-hour watching television gave me a whole new perspective about how the world works, not to mention making me feel like an idiot for feeling bad because I didn't have a girlfriend.

"But I don't like history. What's past is past; let's just look into the future," I hear some someone saying out there.

OK, not that I'm agreeing, but that's that person's prerogative. However, history isn't even close to the only reason to watch television.

In the past couple of years, I've gotten to relive childhood memories as I watched my heroes, Bo and Luke Duke, saving Daisy (I never realized just how short her shorts really are).

I've gotten to see Marion Barry get caught smoking crack, in-depth political coverage before a campaign and even O.J. driving slowly away from the cops.

And speaking of O.J., would any of us realize just how ineffective the justice system is if we hadn't gotten to watch the "trial of the century" day by day?

And there's more.

Not that I'm old enough to remember Vietnam, but I guarantee the public outrage against the war wouldn't have been nearly as strong without the daily gruesome images of American and Vietnamese soldiers killing each other with civilians in the way.

I also got to see the World Cup live from France, courtesy of ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC.

Like I said, there is a whole lot of crap on television, too. The world could definitely do without the turkey hunting show ESPN feels fit to air at 3 a.m. Cinemax After Dark, better known as skinomax, is just soft porn for those who want get to aroused by a machine without the responsibility of showing their face at the rental counter. But any way you look at it, from pop culture with MTV to news with CNN and history with the History Channel, the invention of television was the biggest step in showing people from around the world who and what else is out there.

Now, I'm not saying that watching television should be a replacement for reading or interacting with others, but without it, you just don't know what's going on around you.

So go ahead and kill your television if you want, but I'm keeping mine.

I've got two episodes of "The Simpsons" to watch tonight anyway.

Seth Doria is the sports editor of the Arizona Summer Wildcat.