All of that changed this weekend with the announcement of the continuing "child abuse" perpetrated by a now retired assistant football coach with the knowledge of many in authority. Not only did the university authorities fail to report the felony to the police, they awarded the offending man an emeritus status allowing him the continued use of the field house where the felonies were to continue. We were with an Alum of Penn State when the news broke. He was devastated that his university had acted in such a way as to ignore and cover up a report of child rape.
With age, wisdom is supposed to come to us. It also dims some of one’s memories of youth. We can all be relatively sure that in our late teens and early twenties we were not as thoughtful as we are now. Can we even go as far as saying that many college students are solipsistic. And, still, I was shocked when students went to Coach Paterno’s house chanting “just one more game”.
We all probably have some small sadness that the Coach is leaving under such damaging circumstances. Not because he was leaving in such a manner but because he was not the hero we thought him to be. How can he play the victim as if to compare his situation to the damage that was done to those vulnerable young boys. If Paterno were the hero we believed him to be, he would not have failed to discharge his responsibility to children. He simply reported the “incident in the shower” to University authorities and continued to work with the perpetrator. If Paterno were the class act we believed him to be, he would have resigned saving the University the difficulty of having to fire him. Is any coaching assistant so important that the rape of young boys can be forgiven or ignored? Is the student body really so callus as to do so?
What kind of people are we, what kind of society are we if we place more importance on a winning sports team and a winning coach than we place on the rape of our children.
No comments:
Post a Comment