Monday, October 19, 2009

Balloon boy barfed....did you see it?




Deep breath. Confession. I have been sucked into this drama of the boy in the balloon. (I love how we have to give things names, even if they're false....news alert: HE WAS NEVER IN THE BALLOON) You'd be hard pressed to miss it, considering every show from The View, to Campbell Brown, Larry King and the super brain, Rachel Maddow has covered it. I didn't fall down the rabbit hole until Friday morning when I tuned in to ABC's Good Morning America (my favorite morning show) at 7:00 am. The superbly dazzling Diane was interviewing the family. What happened after that was just a moment of weirdly bizarre, train wreck television. Probably never to be repeated.

You've all seen it by now....the tired, confused, shut down kid barfed on national television. Watching it live in my kitchen while attempting to grind coffee, I was screaming at the top of my lungs....NO WAY. NO WAY. HOLY SHIT. I happen to have a contact or two at GMA and emailed my pals and it turns out that everyone there was just as shocked as those of us at home watching the family watching the poor, traumatized kid puke on television. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the family? The media? Or the public that numbs out to all of it? The whole thing is absurdly bizarre and I am embarrassed for "us" narcissus....those who desire attention no matter the cost. At the end of the day if you are allowing your child to barf on national television FOUR times and pretending he has floated away in an aluminum balloon or agree to go on Wife Swap, your ego is bigger than anything else in your life and you may want to check yourself before you wreck yourself. And to those of us who have indulged in this circus act, the sick pleasure of watching alien/human beings do sick and twisted things, we are just as guilty as the parents. For if it weren't for us and the insatiable desire to watch human beings make asses out of themselves, they would have no audience.

I seriously hope this family gets some help, or help gets to them for putting their kids in harm's way and for exposing them to this strange world. And for their aching need to be television stars and storm chasing cowboys. And I hope that we find some way to tune out when the chatter is so loud so that we are able to tune in to a frequency of truth, and the real issues that face us today. Maybe that's why the balloon boy (there I go again) has swept us away -- because for one week, which is how long this should last, we can leave our own demoralizing issues behind, and be whisked away by a barfing boy whose false claim (to his parent's fame) is that he took a Peter Pan flight high over the Rockies in a home made spacecraft balloon.

Note to Self: Just when you think life can't get more bizarre....it does.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, I watched in disbelief. All I kept thinking was that "I hope he doesn't fall out." Of course there was no way I would know that a balloon could never hold a boy his size!! How could they do that? It made me so angry that they (the parents) used their kids, the law enforcement of Colorado and all of us! The police, FBI, airplanes and whoever else was involved in searching could have been looking for someone who really was missing!! I hope the family is made accountable for their actions. But, they will probably end up with a reality show and that will tick me off even more!

    I also saw Diane's interview in GMA (she's my fave)! The mom looked like she didn't know what to do when her child was getting sick. Get up and take him to the bathroom; it's not brain surgery!!

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