Didn’t it used to be that places like Aruba welcomed Americans? Come spend your tourist dollars here, enjoy the sun,
the over-priced drinks. Now the island of Aruba has had
enough of Americans. Well, of the American media…particularly Fox. Since this whole Natalee Holloway thing broke
and ignited once again a media frenzy over a single missing girl, the island has been swamped with media types who, one
can guess, are not quite the laid back sort who populate the island. Islanders feel their country is being invaded by
media hordes and its reputation being sullied world-wide (or at least America-wide).
There are all sorts of essays we can write about this. How the media so oddly focuses on one person (aka:
Laci Petersen, et. al.) and makes them the center of a frenzy that feeds the
public’s hunger for murder, intrigue, lost people (persons?). Every year, it seems, one poor soul or case gets
selected to become the TV cause celeb du jour…to mix my foreign clichés. The media juggernaut is largely
unstoppable. You’d have to put up a great wall to keep them out. Which is why you can understand how dismayed the folks
in Aruba are now when it comes to this case. Let’s hope for their sake that this thing gets solved and that the made
for TV movie gets made and the people of Aruba can go back to their quiet island ways.