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The moral void at Penn State
Bad behavior, scandal and evil are part of the human condition. So is giggling and gossiping about it.
I doubt the world has become darker, nastier and more dangerous than it was in the good old days, whenever they existed, but you would be excused for thinking otherwise. Around the clock cable news and instant information available with a few keystrokes leave the impression that single women are constantly disappearing from Caribbean islands and mothers are regularly murdering their children.
We either tune it out, as I do, or are entertained by the salacious details. In other words, we become hardened to the steady drumbeat of human misery and malfeasance.
But a week after news of the Penn State football pedophilia scandal broke, I still can't wrap my brain around it, and the story won't leave my consciousness.
The similar and much larger-scale tragedy of predatory sex in the Catholic Church didn't surprise me because it involved the religion of my youth, and I had long suspected unsavory activity was being hidden behind the medieval attitudes and costumes.
Penn State football is different. It was seemingly created and certainly run by a bonafide scholar with Lombardi-esque clarity about right and wrong.
Joe Paterno was on a pedestal high above the tawdry cheating and hypocrisy of big time college sports. He produced national champions the right way, with respect for the rules and zero tolerance for ethical fuzziness.
Or so we thought. As the details of the Penn State situation dribbled out in the past week, I have become increasingly astounded at the moral cowardice apparently epidemic at a nationally esteemed school entrusted with shaping future generations of Americans.
Paterno was a poseur as a leader of young men, and we were all taken in by him. A decent person would have asked questions, pursued the troubling report he received, and called the police.
High-ranking university administrators covered up, looked the other way and even lied under oath, according to criminal charges filed against them. We are talking the alleged rape of a boy estimated to be 10 years old in a school athletic facility, and that was not the only reported incident that should have been immediately referred to off-campus police.
What kind of moral midgets are these people?
How should we react to this? The temptation is to become even more cynical than we are as a country. The better choice is to be less gullible.
Be realistic about those who command hero status. Don't expect them to be any more saintly and courageous than the average working stiff, and hold them to common sense ethical standards. Nobody, not even the winningest coach in major college football history, gets a free pass from doing the right thing.
Click on this Huffington Post link to see a timeline of the sequence of events involving the Penn State scandal. It's chilling.
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mistertony25 | Nov. 15, 2011 at 2:13 p.m. (report)
Just some corrections, MKE; McQueary was a 28YO grad assistant coach when the incident took place. He is a former player at Penn State, but he was their quarterback and that was in the mid-90s. To your point, he was more than physically able to stop the rape; which he is hinting at now in some statements coming out. I'm so disappointed in how this university seems far more concerned with protecting their "brand" than they are/were protecting these kids.
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TosaJim | Nov. 15, 2011 at 8:10 a.m. (report)
I think the entire staff should be fired and let them start fresh. The new coach was with Paterno for 30 years and some other coaches for many years too. You can't tell me that this tight knit group did not talk to each other about the Sandusky problem...then "circle the wagons" ....come up with a story they would all stick to under questioning. Sandusky has 4 kids of his own and did foster care too...I hope that his kids and the former foster kids have been examined too....what an animal.
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EastSideMKE | Nov. 14, 2011 at 11:02 a.m. (report)
I will be the first to admit that I do not know the whole story here, but from what I have read about it so far, I don't understand why everybody, including Penn State, is coming down on Paterno so hard? Is it because he has the most name recognition? My big problem is with this McQueary character who witnessed Sandusky anally raping a 10 year old boy in the showers and did nothing about it besides calling his daddy, who told him to turn tail and run. At the time McQueary was a Penn State linebacker, but somehow he could not muster up the courage to stop and old man from sexually abusing an innocent child? If it were me in his shoes, I probably would have lost it and beat that piece of human garbage to death with my bare hands. Then I would have called the police. Instead, he took daddy's advice and hightailed it out of there and waited until the next day to report it to his boss, Paterno. Paterno notified his higher ups and nothing was done about it. Horrible as it may sound, I do not feel Paterno was the one who should have been responsible for calling the cops and he should not have been fired while this douchesmoothie McQueary gets to keep his job when he witnessed the crime firsthand. If anything, McQueary should be brought up on charges of some kind for failing to help that boy.
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