Honey Boo Boo

The fact that we, as Americans, are viewing a video of a person committing suicide a couple hundred thousand times says something about the direction in which our society is headed. The more disturbing and shocking a video is, the more people flock to it. Just as the video of Tony Scott’s suicide interested us, the outlandish Honey Boo Boo character also tweaks our interest. Why does this little 6 year old attract over 2 million viewers? Because she’s a child that the average person has never seen before. The thought of a mother giving her daughter liquid crack to do better while she dances and lip-syncs is something that we wouldn’t even imagine happening. This is exactly why were so drawn to it. We can sit on our couch and watch this crazy munchkin and her equally as repulsive mother live their sorry pathetic lives while we laugh.

Albom’s views these two videos as the “melting of our humanity.” I agree to a certain extent. I see the melting of our humanity more when I think of the gruesome movies that Hollywood releases in the modern era. After watching Hostel and Last House on the Left I felt numb and shocked beyond belief. My only thought was how could someone actually make a movie that depicts acts so horrifically real as entertainment? Both forms of entertainment contribute to the “melting of our humanity,” but I find it more disturbing that movies depict these grisly acts than watching a crack baby do pageants. The two are related though, in the way both forms of entertainment shock us. We want to be surprised, we want to see something that’s going to make us uneasy; it is simply what the American entertainment system is feeding off of at this point in time.

The final question Albom presents is: is reality TV making us apathetic? I completely agree with him. Why save a man’s life, when watching him die will get you hits on YouTube? Why try to sort out this circus of a family when we can simply amuse ourselves from their pitiful excuse of a life? We would rather enjoy the show than to do anything to stop it and from all the new reality shows coming to our attention, the trend will only continue to get worse.