Let’s help them go away already…please?

I can’t believe I’m writing about Jon and Kate Gosselin.  In case you’ve lived under a rock, they’re the couple with eight children (one set of twins and sextuplets) that chose to make their family life the center of a reality TV show and are now getting divorced.  Sadly, we’re getting to see the ugliness of their divorce played out in the media.

Let me say for the record, I think Jon is a jerk who has behaved like a little child. Yet the media coverage seems to be spinning their divorce into a wholly one-sided “Kate-was-wronged” story.  Guess what?  She’s acted like an ass, too.  But when it comes down to it, I don’t care who is to blame; they’ve both played a role in a painful divorce.

What seems most clear to me is that these are two people who chose to milk the media spotlight for all they could.  Who knows if their marriage would have survived without all of the attention, but I feel pretty confident that it hastened the demise.  Jon and Kate got the spotlight they wanted but what did their kids get?

So why am I writing about this?  Because I’m hoping that people will stop consuming Gosselin divorce media.  Will it change the pain and acrimony of the divorce? No. But I think those eight children will have had enough to deal with, let alone seeing their parents split aired out for the world to see (and saved in perpetuity on the web).  What’s more, I hate the idea of rewarding bad behavior; we should stop feeding what seem to be Jon and Kate’s insatiable need for the media spotlight.   Let’s start now.  Just say no to all things Gosselin.