TV

I found this cool article in Z Magazine on Liberation Psychology and the chronic passivity of the American citizenry in response to authoritarian injustice. http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/23030
In the article there is a short passage on television:

"Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy." Television, [Jerry]Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population: (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves—and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration compounded this by relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumizes" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Tell it to your kids when they 'demand' to watch television. Also notice the inherent power in the list form