Had my balloon burst
I heard about the balloon incident, as they're now calling it, last Thursday on the way to pick up Sparky from school. It was unusual for me to hear about it that way, because I leave my browser open while I'm working, and major national news usually hits the front page of Yahoo pretty quickly, so it's not often that I hear about something first on the news radio station in the car. But this story caught me off guard, and it upset me, as a parent, which was, I imagine, exactly the intent. I thought about how scared the kid must be, if he were stuck in the balloon...after all, in those stories where a kid gets trapped in a drain pipe or something, rescuers can at least talk to the child, and try to be reassuring, but that wasn't possible in this case. I remember the reports stating that there was a chance that the child wasn't in the balloon at all, and I wondered why observers couldn't tell the difference between the flight characteristics of an empty balloon and one with a child's weight in it. I was hearing this on the radio, though, and I had no idea of the size or structure of the balloon, so I assumed the media had done their job of fact-checking, and I just believed the whole thing. It didn't last terribly long, and I was both relieved and unsurprised when I learned the kid had never been in the balloon at all, but the scenario was so grim, with a child involved, that I didn't think the parents would be capable of staging the whole thing.
I really don't think I'm as gullible as all that, though. When the Bonnie Sweeten case was unfolding in Philadelphia, I immediately thought, "This story doesn't sound quite right," but then I felt bad about drawing that conclusion about a possibly kidnapped woman, so I didn't voice those suspicions until I learned that it was a scam.
I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. I'm pretty angry at the parents, in the same way I get angry when I catch an author plagiarizing...not so much annoyed at being tricked, but annoyed that they assumed I'd never catch on. Being honest, at least half of that anger is at myself, for being tricked in the first place. Which indicates that I want to be more cynical, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I really don't think I'm as gullible as all that, though. When the Bonnie Sweeten case was unfolding in Philadelphia, I immediately thought, "This story doesn't sound quite right," but then I felt bad about drawing that conclusion about a possibly kidnapped woman, so I didn't voice those suspicions until I learned that it was a scam.
I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. I'm pretty angry at the parents, in the same way I get angry when I catch an author plagiarizing...not so much annoyed at being tricked, but annoyed that they assumed I'd never catch on. Being honest, at least half of that anger is at myself, for being tricked in the first place. Which indicates that I want to be more cynical, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.