Will I be the last person in the world to buy a $4,000 flat-screen plasma TV? I see the ads in the paper every day and all I can think is “Where is everyone getting $4,000?” The last time I had an “extra” $4,000 I wasted it on food, taxes and health insurance. What was I thinking? I could have had a TV. Not that I could have afforded to watch it. Once you get the $4,000 TV, you’ve got to subscribe to cable or satellite or there’s no point. And you don’t want the basic package, you want the HDTV package with all the sports and the movie channels, so let’s add a $150 each month to the cost of your television. Face it, once you’ve seen “Deal or No Deal” on a giant, flat-screen plasma TV, there’s no going back to the 27-incher.

When I was a kid, there were only three channels on television. Unless you lived in a big city where they might have one or two extras. And there was the “educational channel” on the UHF dial. We could never figure out what that UHF dial was for, it never seemed to work.

But there were problems. Some people didn’t like the stranglehold the three networks had on the news. Some people thought shows like “Petticoat Junction” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” proved we were a culture in decline. I thought Lawrence Welk was old and hokey. But I watched him because whatever was on the other two stations was even older and hokier, which is hard to imagine. Half of Ed Sullivan’s audience watched to see the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The other half watched to see plate spinners and Senor Wenceslas. To this day, his two audiences have a hard time speaking to each other.

People complained about how bad all three channels were, how nothing was on. Now we have hundreds of channels and thousands of shows. And guess what? People complain about how bad television is. They don’t like the cable news channels, they don’t like the shows, they don’t like the violence, they don’t like what the kids are seeing, they don’t like the music videos. How buying a $4,000 TV will solve those problems is beyond me.

For me, the biggest change in TV since I was a kid hasn’t been what’s on it, but how we watch it – with the clicker in our hands. The invention of the remote control, the clicker, changed TV and it changed us. When they first came out, comedians used to make fun of the people who had remote control channel changers. How lazy can you get? Pretty lazy, as it turns out.

In “The Powers That Be,” David Halberstam tells a story about Walter Cronkite watching TV at the home of his boss, the founder and president of CBS, Bill Paley in the mid-’60s. At one point they want to change the channel and Cronkite says, “Bill, where’s the clicker?”