You walk into your room stressed and decide you’ll watch one episode of The Office on Netflix before getting ready for bed although, by the time you notice, you are chowing down on some ice cream and halfway through the season you just started. “Us and Them” by David Sedaris may seem like just a story from his past for entertainment, but it plays on this idea heavily. Taking place when the character was only a child, he talked mainly about his neighbors, the Tomkeys. They did not have a television, and this is what the character found curious in his childhood. He thought it was very inhibitory to have this lack of entertainment, although later would show through his actions that it can actually be negative to have television.

The character first takes pity on the Tomkeys thinking that television is extremely important and informative. “What must it be like to be to ignorant and alone?” the young child wondered, “Could a normal person even imagine it?” (1). This shows that he thinks that they are uninformed about the world and a lot that is going on around them. This would turn to make the character a hypocrite later as he would be uninformed and learn nothing from his mistake because of television. This happens when he first refuses to give HIS candy to the Tomkeys’s children. This would lead to him getting punished in his room. Although, briefly after this punishment he went upstairs to watch tv and forgot completely about the ordeal revealing “Were this the only image in the world, you’d be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others… one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news” (Sedaris 1). This shows that the character just used the television to numb his mind and not have to think about the wrong he had done, it was escapism. The television made him ignorant of what he had done, and thus made the character a hypocrite by showing that television is actually the thing that does make you ignorant.

I related to this greatly as I often will watch tv whenever I am stressed, whether it be about a test (minimizing the time I actually study) or personal affairs which I put off thinking about how to solve. The story really made me think about how I truly handle stress and that I should do it in more of a healthy way: by fixing the problem which is stressing me. This knowledge and opinion changing outlook that the story gave me, as well as the way it was told, made me greatly appreciate it. Not only did I view the work as art, giving me a new outlook on something, but it also gave me entertainment as of the way it was told. Now if you don’t mind, I am going to go block this out by watching some more television.

Works Cited:
Sedaris, Daivd. “Us and Them.” NPR, NPR, 2004, www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/jun/sedaris/usandthem.html.