To a small, un-athletic, severely near-sighted, brutally bullied little boy growing up in a rough working class Oregon town, PBS was a lifeline. After each day’s ration of physical and verbal abuse at school, I’d come home and spend some time in a world where people were kind and gentle to one another, where learning new things was encouraged, and where there was hope that the world might actually be a better place than what it had shown me it was.

Mr. Rogers, Lady Aberlin, Big Bird, Mr. Hooper, Bert and Ernie – these were the friends came to me through OPB, who comforted me, who demonstrated how good people behaved towards one another, who told me that the quiet, bookish, gentle little boy that I was was perfectly fine to be. They were my role models, my teachers, my inspiration to resist becoming like the base, crass, and brutal thugs who made my life a living Hell.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS are not simply mass media, they are a positive societal good. In a vast wasteland, they have long shown brightly as a beacon to all who would like to be better informed, better educated, and, as a result, better people. They are the only media entities that have no ulterior political or financial motivations. What they offer the people of the United States is beyond monetary value. They offer something that is in desperately short supply in America: hope.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I likely would not be alive and writing this today had it not been for public broadcasting, and I strongly suspect that I am not alone in this. Those who would destroy it are no better than – and perhaps are identical with – the vicious, violent little bullies who tormented me throughout my own childhood. Perhaps if they had themselves spent a little more time in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood instead of the “abuse or be abused” neighborhoods of our town, their lives may have become better as well. If public broadcasting in America is allowed to be destroyed, the price that we will pay in individual lives and as a society will be beyond calculation.

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