Media Hissy Fit
The media seems hellbent on having the family involved in the Colorado balloon incident publicly stoned at a minimum. They want the parents charged and the children taken away and all their money seized and personal apologies delivered to the millions of people who who caught up in the frenzy involved in this event.
There is no recognition that a local missing child report was turned into a national event by the media, not the family.
I probably wouldn’t even comment on this if I hadn’t read Fallenmonk’s piece, Childhood Wilderness, which brought back memories of my own childhood down here, which were very similar.
The thing is, I was one of three boys, like the Colorado family, and my Dad built things.
We didn’t have a large mylar balloon, but we did have a 14-foot boat that occasionally wandered around the bayou with no one in it, as my Dad worked out bugs in remote control systems that would be used to control Air Force drones and guided weapons.
My Dad built the boat, and water skis, and anything else that was felt to be necessary on the bayou.
My brothers and I sprang up in the morning, during the summer, pulled on shorts, grabbed a quick breakfast, and headed out in the morning. Meals were the only time my Mother saw us, and no one asked what we were up to. They really didn’t want to know, because it would have just upset them.
I can relate to the kids in Colorado. I understand about having a personal hiding place that your brothers don’t know about, because there were occasions when you were hiding from your brothers.
As near as I can tell, the real reason the media is mad is because the event didn’t end the way they wanted it to. They need to grow up,
5 comments
Nobody likes it when someone punk’s the media, even when the media punk’s itself.
.-= last blog ..Saturday Video II =-.
Oh, good grief… what young boy wouldn’t love that Mylar balloon, and I include myself in “young boy” in this case. When I was a kid, purely passive communications satellites were made of Mylar balloons, and we all stood around at night to see them pass overhead; any of us would have been thrilled to have one in our own hands.
As for parental “irresponsibility,” again, good grief; Mom kept some disinfectant handy for the inevitable scrapes we got, but no one thought we should be confined at home to avoid the scrapes. My parents weren’t even too upset the time I fell, dislocated a kneecap and had to walk on a stick for a couple months (and oh, what a cool hand-carved stick it was; we borrowed it from an elderly Mexican-American neighbor who saw nothing unusual either in my dislocation or in lending his stick to a neighbor kid).
Kids cannot possibly be any less sturdy today than we were in ancient times… what’s up with the media frenzy, anyway?
My Mother considered it a miracle that we didn’t break any bones during childhood as coming home bruised from falling out of a tree wasn’t exactly an unknown occurrence, nor was getting knocked off the dock by a playful dolphin [the suckers would steal fish right off your hook as you pulled them up.]
They have been ragging on the cops for not searching the attic over the garage, even though the kid had to show them how he managed to get up there, which wasn’t exactly by an obvious or direct path, nor one that could be used by anyone larger or heavier that the kid.
Even today, at my age, I would be hard pressed not to want to see that balloon fly. I assume one of the reasons he used mylar was to make it easy to track on radar, to avoid problems of aircraft running into it. Having it tethered was like setting up an elaborate dominoes display – it’s hard not to want “the show” to begin.
The hardest part of trying to coach kids soccer [excluding dealing with parents], is to convince the kids to pass the ball and not all converge on it [and to go to the bathroom before the game started]. Kids want to do, they don’t want to watch.
nobody forced the media to cover this story….. and now they feel duped
too bad
If the media did their job, rather than trying to plug things into their pre-established narratives, they wouldn’t be so easily fooled all the time.
Anyone who wants a lot of media coverage just has to package their event as one of the predetermined classes of story, and the media is all over it. Report actual news that requires them to do some work, and they’ll ignore you.