Total Honesty

Okay, I hate to admit it but I saw part of a Maury Povich show yesterday. I was at my friend's house (she is just moving in) and the power went out in this fantastic storm that came over. When it came back on, somehow her cable box defaulted to whatever network was showing Maury yesterday afternoon. The show was titled something like "The 10 Top Paternity Shows Ever"...it was a piece of crap but somehow I ended up watching the end of it.

Thing I don't get about these shows is where they find these people from? I mean, why would a girl who has apparently slept with more than just her boyfriend/husband, get on national television telling everyone that she is 100% sure that so and so is the father of her kid if she knows that there is a possibility (because of whomever else she slept with) that the kid is not his? That just makes no sense to me. She knows that she is taking a chance at making herself look like just as much of a j@ck@ss as he might be.

In a couple of the cases the girl was telling the husband/boyfriend that the two kids she had while with him, weren't his...nice. And you say you care about this person that you would do that to them on national television? One boy was only 21 and he had 6 kids from 5 different women, but was only taking claim for 3 of them. Apparently he had never heard of a condom...he'll be paying everything he makes in child support for the rest of his life.

Now obviously paternity is not the only topic that is covered in these shows but it seems, more often than not, that every time I glimpse daytime talk shows like these in an attempt to find something interesting on television during the afternoon, it is on there. I don't know if that is because our country just has a lot of people producing children with unknown origins, or if we just have a bunch people that think 15 minutes of fame entails dragging all those that you say love through a national spectacle. I guess reality is that if there weren't people at home watching it, it wouldn't be on there (now I too have contributed to this mess).

What really sucks is that someday the kids of these people are going to end up seeing these tapes and have their lives shook up once again.