heene's balloon

if anything, this heene family saga is indicative of the direction of our culture: people want to be on TV and will do whatever they can to get on it. this is an aspiration for most people and it's so depressing.

also symptomatic of this aspiration, people want to be told what to think and feel. i think we're so jaded and desensitized, most of us don't know what to feel anymore. the malaise of the modern man has killed our ability to feel. so we follow stories like "the boy in the balloon." we now take our cues from popular culture. the story of flacon heene captured america's attention because it told us how to feel with hourly updates: the anguish of a missing child, the terror of thinking the poor child was hanging on for dear life in that ballon... it's all very morose and morbid. but people watched it, following it fervently until the final climax.

sigh. and it turns out heene did this "for the show." and now we're mad, disgusted, feeling duped and ready to crucify the heene family.

what happened to making a mark with talent and knowledge? for what you can do as opposed to displaying the mundane inanity of every day humanity, replete with insecurities, stupidity and herd mentality, of which we are all guilty, in ill-advised reality tv shows?

chekhov once wrote to his brother, who made a self-deprecating comment in a sign off of a letter:
"do you know where you should be conscious of your worthlessness? before god, if you please, before the human intellect, beauty, and nature, but not before people. among people one must be conscious of one's human dignity."