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Edited on Thu Jan-28-10 04:38 PM by scarletwoman
First of all, I have always had a roof antenna -- it's what you do when you live in the boonies (and I mentioned that I lived in the boonies in my OP). For over 10 years it dependably pulled in 5 analog stations, and occasionally another 2 when certain atmospheric conditions were present.
Digital signals are weaker than analog signals. My problem is distance. Digital signals only travel about 55 miles, and I live almost 80 miles from the nearest transmission tower. Unless someone puts up the money to build some repeaters between there and here, we who live out here are simply out of luck, unless we buy satellite TV (there is no cable out here, either).
Now to my central theme. The selling off of our analog airwaves was yet another attack on "The Commons" -- those resources traditionally held to belong to all inhabitants in common. The official story behind this sale of OUR airwaves was that additional analog airspace was desperately needed by emergency services for increasing their radio bandwidths.
The truth is, the bulk of this bandwidth was bought up by private, for-profit entities, with maybe only 10 or 15 percent going to the allegedly bandwidth-starved public non-profit entities like emergency services.
And yes, I know all about how digital TV conversion worked wonderfully well in Europe. Of course it did -- most of their countries are smaller than many of our states. Distance isn't a problem there -- there ARE no huge distances between urban population centers and rural areas like there are here in the U.S. The scale is very different.
So, in a huge spread-out country like the U.S., there was no way that a limited 55-mile signal like digital broadcast would reach into every rural area. Too bad. Folks who couldn't get the free digital signal were "free" to change over to PAY TV if they wanted to keep getting the stations that would no longer reach them.
And thus, another big bite was taken out of The Commons. Nowadays, few U.S. citizens even have a concept of The Commons. We've all been enculturated to accept private ownership of everything in our society. Yet the idea of "The Commons" was once a wholly agreed upon centuries-old tradition -- the establishment of our National Park system arose out of that collective understanding, the understanding that the People, and ONLY the People, were the rightful "owners" of certain resources.
That's also how the concept of Public Airwaves came to be. It was considered a resource rightly held in common, to be administered for the Public benefit. That's why there used to be a "Fairness Doctrine". But the past 30-some years have seen the power of wealth, the power of privitazation, of OWNERSHIP, given increasing precedence over our traditional cultural heritage of "The Commons".
I will NOT give my money to any gigantic media corporation, to support their loathesome miasma of infotainment, lies, and all the useless numbing consumerist garbage that they purvey. I miss PBS, but I will not be held hostage by the forces who hypnotize the populace with unreality in order to watch Nova again.
For me, true freedom means acting in as many ways as possible in non-cooperation with the forces that are destroying our common wealth and welfare. I do not own a credit card, I bank with a local credit union, I do not shop at Walmart, and I live as lightly on the earth as I am able.
And I'll live without TV, rather than being blackmailed into paying for that which was once rightly free. None of us will have true FREEDOM until we refuse to assist in the forging our own chains. And that is what the quote in my OP is about. We have to free OURSELVES, WE have to take our freedom, it cannot and will not be given to us by anyone else.
sw
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