I'm having your baby!"
"You're lying, woman! That's not my kid!"
Stagehands dressed in top-to-toe black jumpsuits rush to the stage and pull apart the screaming couple. The crowd is on its feet, screaming for blood. Tears flow, punches fly, and bleeps are exchanged.
I am trying to concentrate on the morning's edition of the Baltimore Sun and my bowl of soggy Froot Loops, but my eyes are constantly drawn upward to the blaring television set. It's eight in the morning. I didn't want my day to start like this, uncomfortably close to someone else's private, personal problems. Unfortunately, I have no choice. If I want to get a meal, I have to suffer through daytime television.
Maury, The Jerry Springer Show, Jenny Jones and Montel -- no show is too twisted or depressing to play on the twin television sets that hang from the ceiling in Terrace. A recent Springer episode, titled "Tales of the Midget Klan," featured a woman who dumped her boyfriend, a member of a midget version of the Ku Klux Klan, for a secret black lover. In "Lesbian Family Affairs," a girl told her family that she had been sleeping with her aunt. On the Maury Povich show, I watched a daughter accuse her mother of sleeping with the daughter's fianc??.
These shows have been proven to be detrimental to our long-term psychological health. A 2001 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics linked watching violent or aggression-themed television shows to antagonistic behavior in adolescents. An isolated episode of Springer or Jenny Jones isn't going to turn a normal student to hostility, but the same violent shows, day after day, can push an overworked and stressed-out undergraduate over the line. One trash talk show was recently directly linked to a brutal death: in February, a Montel Williams episode about domestic abuse sparked an argument in an Oklahoma bedroom that ended with a woman fatally wounding her husband with a .22-caliber rifle.
The other shows that are played in Terrace aren't much better. When it's not a cheesy soap opera drowning out our conversations, it's another banal episode of The Price Is Right. To quote Adam Sandler, "The price is wrong." I'm tired of watching old people try to win cars, beds and blenders. Stop jumping up and down and go back to your homes.
I once asked one of the Terrace managers why we have to watch junk television all day long. He told me that students were welcome to walk up to the televisions and change the channel. There are three problems with this policy. The first is that no single student is going to be willing to provide the public good of changing the channel. The second is that few students can physically reach the buttons on the television, which are more than eight feet from the ground. Finally, it wouldn't matter even if it were easy to change the channels, because every station is playing the same types of shows during the breakfast and lunch hours.
There's a simple solution to this problem: the installation of cable in the dining halls. Right now, the Terrace televisions only receive the major network channels. If Terrace installed cable on the two televisions, we wouldn't have to sit through another soap opera or talk show.
Instead of watching trash, we could eat breakfast and lunch while absorbing the day's news. We're busy students here at Hopkins, and I've found that it can be tough to take the time to keep up with rapidly changing world events. There are several quality 24-hour news channels available with basic cable. Keeping the televisions tuned to these stations during the day would turn a hostile eating environment into a place where students can be better informed.
Cable is a cheap solution. If Hopkins doesn't care enough to pay for improvements to our student life, I am willing to personally foot the bill for the installation of cable in Terrace. It would be sad if an institution with an endowment in the billions didn't care enough to provide such a basic educational service to its students, but if necessary, I will pay.
It's in everyone's best interest to cut the junk. Let's get rid of trashy daytime television and make Terrace a better place to eat and socialize.
Joshua Robinson's column appears every two weeks.
