Shoestring Century

As you’ve likely heard by now, members of the Heene family created dozens of YouTube videos prior to this whole “Balloon Boy” fiasco.  The viewer comments left under these videos are universally scathing (i.e. “What was he thinking?” “Those boys are so disrespectful!”).  That’s fine – go ahead and call Richard Heene out for his foolishness.  But there’s a common refrain in these comments that I find distressing: One after another, some anonymous YouTube viewer calls for Child Protective Services to kick the door down, take Falcon, Ryo, and Bradford away, and shatter this family.

“Self absorbed dad, CRAAAAAAAAAAZY mom, and out of control undisciplined kids. It was only a matter of time before something bad happened. Glad the kid is okay. Now is time for CPS to investigate.”

“your fucking nuts and your kids will be taken away lol”

“These Heene people are bizarre.  Is anyone wondering how such an out of control family ‘lost’ their son?  He needs parenting classes!  Is CPS watching this nonsense?”

“I think child protection services have to you intervene for this child.  He is psychologically under pressure to perform, and he is only 6 years old.  Their father has to be arrestted as a statement.”

“Child protection needs to look into this shiteous ‘father’ whoring his kids out like this.  Shame.”

You’re reading a blog that asks the question:  What will it take for our culture to be healthier at the end of the century than it is now? It will take intact families.  Just how a healthy family works is always evolving, but we do know that the evolutionary process begins with random mutation.

We must respect a family’s right to be eccentric.  Eccentrics play a valuable role in a culture: they reveal new possibilities.  They are the mutations.  Even after they flame out, if they flame out, we have the privilege of safely picking and choosing from their traits.  Earlier this year, I lamented how the sterilized worldview presented on television is killing off the socially needed archetype of the inventor.  What about the inventor is so incompatible with TV?  Why can’t he exist there?  He has agency and is able to permanently improve his own life – that’s why.  Richard Heene may not be a world-class inventor, but has helped, in his small way, to revive the archetype.  That is laudable.

Those calling on CPS to break up the Heenes, to deprive Falcon of his plainly loving and doting, if imperfect, parents, are casting some deadly stones.  They should ask where such hatred comes from.  They should question why they’re so confident that CPS facilities would be a safer place for Balloon Boy to be than with his own parents, who seem pretty well adapted to his rambunctious ways.  They should ask how their reality, sitting at a computer and blithely commenting on a YouTube video, might differ from the reality of a Colorado family that they’ve never even met.  To paraphrase a Psyience Detectives video:  How does their version of happiness differ from someone else’s version of happiness?

The family is sacred, which is to say it is needed for the survival of our civilization.  Richard Heene can be forgiven his eccentricities.  He will pay dearly, however, for his misguided notion that television could somehow validate or improve his already lovely family.