While I'm on a roll with reality-themed blogs here, I might as well confess my recently-acquired addiction to reality TV.

Five years ago, I did not even subscribe to cable television. I didn't watch that much TV, and didn't see the point in paying for it, of all things.

Then I found myself in the hospital for a few days, and was introduced to "Dancing with the Stars."

I love dancing. I love ballroom dancing. This was wonderful!

Unfortunately, it was aired on what I still refer to as "Channel 4." I live in one of those black holes where cell phone reception and TV signals are far from a sure thing. Channel 4 was mostly static.

It was time for me to get cable, I decided. I had to see "Dancing with the Stars."

Cable service, however, had progressed some distance from its initial days in Bellevue when it cost $12 a month -- $18 if you got HBO. Now there is HD cable, and On-Demand and DVRs -- which has led to the acronym DVR becoming a verb, which is somewhat annoying. "I'm going to DVR it," I find myself saying to my own linguistic dismay. Now your cable service can be your telephone service, and your internet service, and, of course, there's all the neat wireless network stuff.

Before I knew it, I found myself paying almost as much to Comcast each month as I do to my mortgage company.

But as long as I was paying for it, I might as well watch it, right? So I decided to check out some of the shows I'd been hearing people talk about for years. I believe "Survivor" and "The Apprentice" were next, followed by "Big Brother."

My favorite, by far, is the new show ABC put on the air this summer -- "What Would You Do?" This takes reality TV to a much higher level, because it actually holds up a mirror to all of us, so that we can take a look at prejudices and attitudes in a life-changing way, if we're willing to be brutally honest with ourselves. Instead of sitting and watching people honing their skills in deception and pettiness, we can actually learn something about ourselves.

In one recent show, the test was to see how people reacted to youths vandalizing a car in a public parking lot. Would people intercede? Would they call police? The show set up the scenario using both white and black kids who were actors. There was an unexpected result to this study. People walked past the white kids spray-painting graffiti on someone's car, and called 9-1-1 to report black people sitting in a car "looking like they were going to rob somebody." The black people reported in several phone calls were the actors and their families, getting some sleep while they waited for their turn on the staged set.

I felt that show in the pit of my stomach. In this day and age, after all that history has supposedly taught us, could prejudice really be that rampant? As other episodes of "What Would You Do?" reveal, the answer is "apparently so."

Seeing this made me want to be a better person. It made me want to stand up and do my part to help, whatever that might be. It inspired me.

So maybe the cost of my reality TV addiction has been worth it after all.