Television! It's almost impossible to find anything on television worth watching. It hasn't always been that way. I remember the first television set I ever saw. The year was 1948. The TV set was in the show window of a department store in Washington, D.C.

There were at least a dozen people standing outside the store gazing at the "test pattern" on the television screen. As I reflect on that long ago experience I recall that we were all fairly mesmerized by what we saw on display.

It was two more years before I ever really saw anything of substance on television. The Western Auto Store in my hometown was televising the 1950 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies. I stopped by the store on the way home from school just long enough to see Joe DiMaggio and Richie Ashburn come to the plate for their respective teams.

It was not until 1952 that we got a television set in our home, but we were captivated by such shows as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show and Beat the Clock.

During those years I don't remember those pristine programs being anything other than family friendly and sometimes even having moral value. They were certainly not laced with lewdness and saturated with sex like much of television programming today.

However, as early as 1961 Newton Minow, head of the Federal Communications Commission, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters and declared television a "vast wasteland."

Minow added, "The power of instantaneous sight and sound is without precedent in man's history. This is an awesome power. It has limitless capabilities for good and for evil. And it carries with it awesome responsibilities which you and I cannot escape."

After declaring television a "vast wasteland" Minow banned TV on school nights in his own home. His daughter, Nell, was 9 at that time. Now Nell has two children, ages 9 and 12, and they are not allowed to watch TV at all. "When we were growing up TV was not as treacherous as it is today," Nell remarked. "Today TV isn't a vast wasteland. It is a toxic waste dump."

Ozzie and Harriett has been replaced by The Osbournes. Father Knows Best disintegrated into Married with Children. Beat the Clock has devolved into Fear Factor. And the latest fare includes such entertainment drivel as Desperate Housewives and The Simple Life, another reality show that started as a perversion of the old program Green Acres.

According to research conducted by the Parents Television Council the amount of violence, vulgarity and profanity in supposed "family-hour" programming has skyrocketed in recent years. Additionally, television is constantly pushing the envelope with programs presenting hypersexual behavior and casual sexual encounters without consequences.

It is apparent that much of Hollywood under-values the home. Television's perverted portraits of the family and attempts to normalize homosexuality, co-habitation and extramarital affairs are breaching the defenses of wholesome family life.

Not all television is bad, but too much watching - even benign TV programs - stifles creativity, impedes imagination, curbs productivity and limits physical activity, making "couch potatoes" of its victims.

Al Vecchione, former president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions said, "In the roughly fifty years since it was introduced, television has evolved as a menace to our society's mental and even physical health. Increasingly, we see the world only through its lens. TV has transformed everything it has touched - politics, the justice system and the presidency, to name a few."

Vecchione continues, "TV has distorted our values and standards and shaped the minds of two generations of children. Its influence on our mores ... may surpass that of our religious institutions, its capacity to mold public policy may be greater than our political institutions, its reach into our children's minds may be stronger than our educational system."

I might well pray for you the prayer that the Apostle Paul prayed for the church at Thessalonica: "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (I Thessalonians 5:23). I doubt if God would use much televison programming as a refining tool to answer that prayer.