Falcon Heene will be haunted by hoax
While the couple who faked this balloon boy incident are obviously total pillocks who deserve to be punished for what they did, you've really gotta feel sorry for them. I mean, imagine being that needy and insecure that you would even consider doing such a thing, let alone go through with it?
And to do it to your child! They'd already committed a kind of abuse by calling him Falcon. But to demand that he be complicit in such a craven, desperate act to get attention was destructive beyond words. He's obviously been deeply affected by it already - poor sprog barfed twice during live interviews, apparently. But imagine how much anger he'll have about this when he's an adult. Abuse is kind of like wine - but in a bad way. The hurt it causes gets worse and worse over the years.
One of the saddest things about this is that while this incident is pretty extreme, there are countless others not unlike the Heenes; people who are determined to become famous at absolutely any cost. Reality television is such a big industry now that there's actually a place where you can learn to be an expert performer in the medium! Of course the genre was never "real" to start with, but the existence of such an institution makes the label completely invalid. (Don't know what they teach you there - how to be even more annoying than you are already, or something.)
