I don’t know about you, but pretty much everyone I know last week watched the TV footage of Balloon Boy sailing across the country in his dad’s silver contraption.

Adam was at work, and I was theoretically working, too. But for a good part of that horrible couple of hours, we were watching footage of the balloon together and instant-messaging each other. How could this happen? Where were the parents?

The worst part was when the balloon finally landed and rescuers circled it slowly, stabbing at the balloon to let the helium out.

“Why aren’t they looking for the boy?” I typed. “I’d be ripping that thing apart with my bare hands.”

At first it looked like they were going to find nothing more than a body inside. And then they found nothing. Then came word that a cardboard compartment that had been on the bottom was missing. Where was the boy who’d been inside? Along with everyone else, I felt sick.

Alice isn’t much younger than that boy, and to lose her in such an awful way... there just aren’t words to express the hole that would leave in a person’s life.

Now, of course, it looks as though the family staged it all to get themselves a reality show. After their six-year-old barfed twice in a TV interview—what, producers, once wasn’t enough for you to shut off the cameras and microphones?—police had some sharp questions for the mom and dad.

I don’t want to get too judgmental about the family, here. I read this morning that they’d been homeless, and I can see how those circumstances can make a person do desperate, stupid things. They probably did want a reality show, and they put their children in a terrible position to increase their odds.

It’s a cultural problem. These reality shows aren’t “reality” at all. They’re like circus freak shows of previous centuries, piped into our homes 24 hours a day. The same networks that produce these modern freak shows—“Half Ton Teen,” anyone?—keep the cameras rolling when families are melting down or behaving like harpies instead of “real” housewives. They turn tragedy into entertainment and make tons of money in the process. We’re responsible, too. We are the audience that advertisers want to reach.

The sympathetic lighting and inspirational music shouldn’t fool us. These shows profit from people’s misery. It’s gross. We should turn it off. Turning away from these bus wrecks is not going to make people like the Heenes better parents, but at least it will protect their children from being sold out to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, I’m going to turn my own attention, if quietly, to the families I know and admire. Their lives may not be dramatic enough to be featured on TV, but they’re inspiration and comfort for me nonetheless. They’re the actual reality show, and it’s infinitely more meaningful than the fake stuff. These are the families I see shopping for groceries together, the ones having fun choosing cereal and ice cream. These are the parents I see pushing the swings at the park. The ones who each week conquer mountains of laundry, only to do the same thing all over again the next week without complaining about the hopelessness of it all.

They’re the parents who drive their kids to all the unglamorous appointments: the speech therapist, the orthodontist, the library for that book report. They wipe noses, and cheer their kids through challenges.

It’s this sort of stuff, the patient nurturing, that helps little boys and girls grow up into men and women who want to make something better than a profit. They want to make a better world. Here’s to all of them, and to your own reality.

--Martha Brockenbrough