GO (away) PENN STATE!

Watching events unfold in State College, Pennsylvania, over the past couple of days--and I’m sure everyone has heard the story by now of the former Penn State University assistant football coach serially sexually abusing a series of kids over the past 15 years or more; how a graduate assistant witnessed one episode in a shower, reported it to “legendary” Coach Joe Paterno, who in turn reported it to his superiors, who in turn apparently swept it under the thickest, University reputation-preserving carpet they could find, then allegedly lied about it to a grand jury a few years later--I’ve wondered why none of at least four educated, respectable people could have their priorities so screwed up that they would put a university’s “reputation” above the welfare of a child.

In fairness to JoePa, who has not been indicted, he reportedly wasn’t given explicit details about the episode by the graduate assistant witness, only something about “horseplay” in the shower, blah blah blah, and given that the former assistant coach had retired and was not really his employee, he reported it to people who theoretically would be responsible for doing something about it.

Uh huh.

Coach Paterno, Dude! Everybody knows you have iron-fist control over what happens in your facility, and to all accounts you are a good and intelligent man, at least most of the time, and up until relatively recently (retire, already!). Somebody tells you about an adult man engaging in “horseplay” in the shower with a 10-year-old boy, and you decide to kick the problem upstairs? Give me a break.

Then again, you were in your seventies at the time. While I know many people who retain sharp faculties well into their seventies and even eighties, maybe you just aren’t one of them. Or maybe you were just too wrapped up in the football season at the time and the seriousness of the situation didn’t really register, somehow. I’ll let you make your own excuses, though.

All that said, I find myself wondering if things would have been different, if you and the administrators, or even the graduate assistant, might have responded differently if the situation had involved heterosexual pedophilic “sex,” rather than homosexual. Football is generally perceived as “masculine,” after all, despite all the butt-slapping and hanging out half-naked in locker rooms that go on. It was bad enough that the tough former coach at “Linebacker U” was allegedly a pedophile, but my God, a F*G pedophile???

Given your age, Coach, I understand that you might find the homosexual aspect of the situation something you don’t even want to deal with, on ANY level, and, given that the accused had been a long-time friend (albeit not your “heir apparent,” as he had evidently once thought he was), the situation must have been a real, um, pain in the a** for you (although probably not as much so as it was for the 10-year-old boy). So you wrapped yourself in denial and moved on.

But it’s easy to speculate and wonder and rant and judge and on and on and on. That’s what we do best, I sometimes think. (Go back to sleep, JoePa, I’m moving on, sort of).

I’ve got a relative--won’t specify any further--who a bunch of years ago married a guy with two very young kids. The relative had four kids of her own, all older than her new stepchildren. I was living a couple of hundred miles away at the time, and so wasn’t around them much, but when I was, the relative’s treatment of her stepchildren was appalling--not so much physical abuse, but near continuous emotional destruction of the kids, and I did actually hear tales from other family members who DID witness physical abuse, spankings that went beyond simple “corporal punishment,” etc. The relative wound up divorcing the guy, who, aside from letting his children be abused by a crazed harpy, was mostly alright. What to this day I do not understand is why nobody came to the defense of those two helpless kids. I could sort of excuse myself, in a JoePa kind of way, because I didn’t witness the worst of it. But some other relatives DID.

Fast forward a few years, and that relative’s daughter has a family of her own, three kids, and is taking on foster children. Guess how she and her husband are reportedly treating their 6-year-old foster son? From what I hear, same emotional abuse, maybe some physical abuse, although, again, I’m not there to see it so I don’t know. Can we say “cycle of abuse?”

Point is, it’s easy for me to point fingers at Joe Paterno and say what he and the graduate assistant and those worthless administrators “should” have done--and I would like to think that, in his/their position, I WOULD have done. But then I remember two helpless stepchildren and wonder.

This pot is going to refrain from calling any kettles black, right now. The mess in State College, Pennsylvania, right now, from a distance, is enough to disgust anybody. But how many similar messes are going on invisibly anywhere in the country, at any given time?