By Bailey Elise McBride

This obnoxious 6-year-old and his family took the national and international media by storm last week when word got out that the child had floated some 8,000 feet in the air in a hot air balloon/flying saucer/weather contraption thing and had no means to get down.

It was later discovered he had been hiding in the family attic the entire time. National tragedy averted.

Good thing too, because it’s not like the rape, murder and domestic abuse that occurred during that six hour period of time people were watching a balloon float across the Denver sky mattered. The 500 children that the U.N. estimates die every hour in Africa? So what!

Maybe if children in Darfur were dying via balloon, we might care a little more.

The Heene family appeared on Larry King Live last Thursday, dragging out the eight hours of coverage they had already taken up on CNN.

Among other discussions facilitated by King, parents Richard and Mayumi asked their son why he had not come out from hiding when they called his name.

Falcon responded with, “You guys said we did this for the show.”

Really? It was that easy? Now the family has all the media attention they had hoped for, but maybe not in the way they initially expected.

Richard and Mayumi Heene met at acting school in Hollywood, and were almost successful in tricking the entire nation into believing their child was flying high in the sky—even though the helium balloon he supposedly took off in could probably not carry more than 25 pounds.

This balloon incident, hoax, whatever it may have been, is just a prime illustration of many of the problems we face across the country—we are more interested in watching a balloon float across the sky hoping to see a kid fall out than we are with all the things that are really wrong with the world around us.

In my sophomore semester of H2P, Dr. Goodstein-Murphree, the associate dean of the school of architecture, said something in a lecture to the effect that illuminated manuscripts mean nothing to us because we’re all a bunch of modern-media whores.

Though that might be a little blunt, in many ways it’s accurate. It is hard, in a society that values Balloon Boys and Octomoms, to appreciate the things that once took people’s breath away.

The media can’t just focus on the news anymore—not that illuminated manuscripts were ever really headline news in this country anyway—they have to focus on what will draw readers in, and more often than not that means highlighting pop-culture freaks.

When we really think about it, the troubles of Jon and Kate, Michael Jackson’s family and Taylor Swift aren’t really of national importance.

There are so many more things that I would implore people to put their energy and attention toward—the health care reform that is going through Congress, the hundreds of people losing their homes to foreclosures daily and the people who can’t afford to feed their children a meal every day—that when we consider Balloon Boy in context, this incident seems so small.

What is the moral of this story? Maybe we should take the time to appreciate the little things around us, not just the things the media shove in our faces. Maybe we should care about the news that will affect us, and our children, and our neighbors—not what family is getting arrested for their crackpot plans in Colorado.

And finally, if you’re trying to pull a con job on the entire nation, don’t make your partner in crime a 6-year-old.