Balloon Boy’s parents are full of hot air

They wanted a reality show. Well, they got it!

Almost from the moment little Falcon Heene said “you guys said we did this for the show” almost everyone knew that the entire Balloon Boy incident was full of something (hot air or otherwise). When the Colorado Sheriff made it official today, I was happy to hear it. But now what? There’s now plenty of fodder for all the late night talk show hosts and media pundits everywhere. There will be discussions about what charges should be filed, what the punishment should be and so forth. And a lot of people will ask “why should we even care?”

And they are right. We shouldn’t care about Richard and Mayumi Heene. We shouldn’t waste one second more of our lives thinking about them. But we SHOULD care about their children who were unwitting accomplices in this and likely will be scarred from it. We should care about the all of the police, fire and other personnel who joined the mammoth search last week. We should care about the couple whose wheat crop was destroyed by the parade of vehicles (not to mention Black-hawk helicopter) that surrounded the downed balloon. And we should care for all the wasted tax dollars that went in to this perpetrated hoax.

I don’t want to see The Heenes go to jail. Why should more tax dollars be wasted on a couple so intent on attention. If it’s attention they want – give it to them. Give them the attention of the invoices for the police and fire services and the aforementioned helicopter. Give them a bill for all the headaches their neighbors have incurred after the incident with throngs of news crews camped out in their neighborhood. Give them the invoices for the psychiatric care their poor kids will undoubtedly need. But DON’T give them the TV show they apparently want so desperately that they would hijack the nation’s attention for their own gain.

What everyone really should do now is the one thing that will hurt the Heenes the most – IGNORE THEM. The attention is what they wanted from the beginning, since they were on Wife Swap (which I admittedly and proudly DO NOT watch) to this circus. If people are serious about punishing the Heenes, then turn off the camera. Turn off the attention. The media needs to leave their neighborhood. Every news organization should focus on REAL news (or at least whatever else they call news these days). And every blogger out there, yours truly included, need to stop wasting their precious time on a man who clearly has his own mental issues to deal with.

The balloon has deflated. Let’s hope the story deflates along with it.

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