Television and Destiny

Yesterday when I was in a train bringing me to Lakemba, a suburb in Sydney, I found an interesting newspaper, a free newspaper actually – The Epoch Times-. In the page 5, I was amazed by the column wrote by Martin Croucher with the heading ‘ Is television the cause of yob culture ?’. I was interested by the title since in my mind this issue was quite similar to my country and continued to read the entire part. A chairman of current mediawatch in the UK argued that gun crime, violence and aggressive behaviors were resulted indirectly by watching television since television was such a powerful influence, hence models of behavior that are shown regularly could become normalized in society. I definitely agree with that statement, sometimes the majority truth is built by the media. Take for an example, say that gay and lesbian relationships in a normal life are anomaly entities, but the fact, it becomes ‘normal’ in society when all medias justify them in the name of human right even more the society accept the logic either consciously or unconsciously. Next, we’ll see obviously how they turn into the truth of majority when everyone supports all occasions which are held by such weird communities.

Sometimes I just don’t understand their values perspective, that will be okay if they argue these are human rights of Australians which mean they make justification for themselves according to their values, although I’m not quite sure all of Australians accept it. However, I certainly don’t agree if they said this are values of the whole of human being on the world since I, personally, against that poor opinion. Why I say so, that’s because the moral values standardized by a thing that has limited power is the values that we can not rely on. There are many pitfalls in them and has uncertainty of compliance rewards, even the rewards are merely offered and accepted, again, by human beings themselves . It would be different if the moral values we follow are standardized by The Almighty, Allah SWT, with The Holly Quran and As Sunnah as directions. I have no doubt in it and of course the rewards of compliance, though not directly received, are endlessly guaranteed .

By the way, back to the main issue –television-, The chairman admitted that the social declines were caused by other factors such as poverty, poor housing and lack of education, but in addition, television and film make the situation worse. Again, I agree with this. Indonesia has such similar problems even worse I think. Suicide rate in Indonesia is horribly fantastic that 50 000 people suicide every year (WHO) because of socio-economic problems. On the other hand, crime rates also gradually increase ( not know exactly the numbers). Yet there are no proven evidences to the television involvement in those cases (or I have not found it yet ), but the television with various programs, which mostly show entertainments –an sich- covered by violence, pornography, hedonism, mystical etc with less or without educational themes, is being such an intimate friend to almost every family house in Indonesia in which it is turned on from the early morning up to late of night consecutively. I assume that these things indirectly contribute to the society’s behaviours as we know that role modeling is a human nature thus how the society behave is exposed by watching television. Here, I feel so helpless when I realized my own daughter very much focus on watching television, while I could not do anything to pull her out of this since her grandma is beside her instead of me, her mother. We know that sometimes grandparents can not distinguish the feelings between to love and to educate, therefore they let their granddaughters watch tv as long as it can make them happy. I promise myself when I go back home they will get a different situation , to be better of course.

At the end of the article, The chairman said ‘ I don’t know how we are going to get the bottom of the causes of violent crime if at the same time we simply say that this is good entertainment ‘. I made this article based on my awareness that everything has to be changed if we want to get rid of it. Our children’s future, gold of life, is something that we have to sustain instead of to ruin it. We just can simply say NO to the destructive television program watched by our children which is followed by either changing the channel or turning it off. Last but not least, for me, role modeling is the most effective method of education (just the way the Prophet did). If we eager to scroll back the memory we have, there should be a reflection that how our children behave is as a result of modeling their close figures , whoever and whatever it is. So , be their best model in the world !

much loves for my family