This weekend, a reader sent this Reuters story about a candlelight vigil at Penn State, attended by 10,000. Some of the sentiments expressed:
Yenser and other speakers said the school must move forward, but never forget.
[…] “This is definitely a start in the healing process,” said Kolker, a junior.
I’m sure these people are well intentioned, but this talk of moving forward and healing is premature, insensitive and unjust to the victims. There is no forward movement or closure to be had now or anytime in the near future. The story of child rape at Penn State has yet to be told in any degree of fullness, and justice for the victims will be long and painful process. Today, as Jerry Sandusky is characterizing witnessed anal rape as “I have horsed around with kids”, we learn that the director of Second Mile, a licensed psychologist, had no curiosity when he was told that Sandusky’s actions with a boy in the showers at PSU made that witness “uncomfortable”. That man has resigned, but much more remains to be told about his former employer.
Almost 10 more victims have come forward in the last few days. As more victims look for justice, we will have months of discovery and years of lawsuits. We’re going to learn how two institutions took an eyewitness account of child rape, which is incredibly rare in child abuse cases, and used weasel words and willful ignorance to bury it. We’ll learn what sort of deal Joe Paterno made with Sandusky in 1998, what else the PSU football program covered up between then and now, and who else was abused while Second Mile looked the other way. When it is over, the reputation of Penn State, its football program, and its finances, will have taken a tremendous hit. It may well be that the institution will be deeply damaged and may never achieve anything like its past glory. That’s OK, because any institution that systematically covers up child rape for more than a decade doesn’t deserve to “move on”. The victims–not good hearted but ignorant students or alumni of PSU–will decide when and if the healing can begin. And all the prayer in the world will not give those victims justice. The courts will.
Charles Pierce has more in the same vein if you’re interested.
Update: Here’s the sentiment of “moving on” or “the healing has begun” that I’m talking about, courtesy of Sunday’s Daily Collegian [pdf]:
Click to embiggen and read “Saturday’s football game against Nebraska provided a return to normalcy for Penn State”.
bin Lurkin'
I’ll be quite surprised if we learn the full depth of the cesspool at PSU, there are too many powerful people with too much to lose.
Sandusky would have to make it to trial for starters, I’m by no means certain that’s going to happen.
JPL
Sandusky admitted he was in the shower on the Friday night before spring break at 9:30pm with a child. Seems to me that Bob Costas had the perfect opportunity to ask him why he didn’t use his own shower. I assume his house is equipped with a bathroom. He is not being monitored and only signed a signature bond. At this point the crimes are alleged but wouldn’t a no name accused of the same crime have a higher bond?
cinesimon
To fucking right.
I wish I could say my mind has been blown by all those interviewed students, staff, clergy and locals talking about how much they’ve all been affected, how they all need to heal, and how sad it is for the University and surrounding community.
Not one mention of those raped.
I wish I was surprised, but I’m not – Obama’s comment in 2006 about America’s “empathy deficit” rings more true every day in America – and ultra-religious places of America such as Penn State seem to nurture this sick way of seeing the world with their unique and bizarre mix of the worst of Christian supremacy and Ayn Rand.
JPL
@bin Lurkin’: You are not alone in that thought. A relative of mine expressed that Sandusky might take his own life before it goes to trial. If that happened all the secrets might be buried with him. I’m not even sure they would continue with the perjury trials.
Raven
@cinesimon: @cinesimon: That is total bullshit.
Adolphus
I am also tired of the word “closure.”
No, PSU does not need “closure.”
It needs a whole lot of things right now, but it is years away from earning closure.
Joel
I don’t agree with this take for a few reasons. Firstly, the Sandusky case is in the hands of the law, where it should have been more than a decade ago. The appropriate conspirators are facing criminal charges. What more can we ask for? Students at the university did not commit these crimes, nor did they facilitate them. Secondly, you edited your quote for effect:
You also omitted this quote:
Yes, the article was hokey, and it glosses over the riots that occurred earlier in the week. But that was a different story, involving different people. ETA: My blockquoting skills are terrible.
MattF
Note David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/brooks-lets-all-feel-superior.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
His column starts out pretty strong, but ends up blaming the dirty hippies. I realize it’s stupid to feel disappointed about Brooks, but this is a new low.
Nutella
Apparently crimes continue: Sandusky is the only one who knows the 2002 rape victim and seems to be concealing him from the police.
Link: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/shouldn_have_showered_with_kids_hiw6Tvn8f5KAKtrTqaMjJM#ixzz1dmNBdqzF
ETA: And Sandusky tells the reporter that none of this is his fault. He’s brought shame to Penn State and got his former boss fired, and left a trail of child victims, but thinks it’s not his fault.
mistermix
@Raven: Being “there for the victims” means that you don’t say it’s time to “move forward” when we don’t know what’s happened. That contradiction was the point of the post.
@Joel: Two things. First, you can nitpick the choice of quotations all you want, but it’s clear from this article and the scores of others that the sentiment that it’s time to start healing and move forward has been expressed, repeatedly. For example, in Sunday’s Daily Collegian [pdf],
a color photo spread about Saturday’s game included the phrase “a return to normalcy”.
Second, saying that Sandusky is in the hands of the law doesn’t address the institutional issue of the unindicted co-conspirators who will escape criminal punishment but worked to cover this up. The institution of Penn State will and should be damaged by their action (or lack of action) whether or not what they did rises to the level of a crime.
Joel
@mistermix: You cherry-picked the quotation. I pointed that out. That is all.
As for moving forward, what’s the alternative? You might have noticed the amended “never forget”. This same sentiment was expressed after 9/11 and countless other tragic events; were we (the people) wrong then?
bjacques
Ya know, if I were a PSU student, I wouldn’t be hurt so much as pissed that my university flushed tens of thousands of student-years and millions of dollars down the toilet, and might as well rename its mascot the Chickenhawk. ‘Hawk fever! Catch it!
But if yer gonna pray, start by praying that justice comes, no matter what the cost, the least of it being that everyone responsible lives to curse their mothers for having borne them.
BroD
Your point is well taken but I have to take exception to this: “…any institution that systematically covers up child rape for more than a decade doesn’t deserve to “move on”.
To the extent that the institution in question is Penn State, let’s keep in mind that it’s a valued public university with an important educational and research mission.
There are thousands of students,faculty, and staff who engage in the pursuit of that mission with great dedication and integrity and must be allowed–even encouraged–to persist, the outrageous dereliction of a very small number of their colleagues notwithstanding.
Kathy
@Nutella: I caught that too. I don’t see how Sandusky and his lawyer are not tampering with a witness here. Also, Joe Nocera (who I am not always a big fan of) has a decent antidote to Brook’s garbage.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/nocera-penn-states-long-road-back.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
mistermix
@Joel: The alternative to moving forward is dozens of lawsuits, millions of dollars paid from PSU’s endowment, kicking Penn State out of the Big Ten and having the football team to play in Division II for a few years. It’s not “moving forward” versus “never forget”. Its “advocate consequences that will deter other institutions” versus “leave it to the law, we have no moral obligation to do anything but what the law requires”.
Gin & Tonic
Semi-peripheral, but some report had it (maybe the NYT) that the Second Mile director who just resigned (Raykovich?) was earning about $133k/yr. That seems like a lot for a not-very-large regional charitable organization. It may go toward explaining his lack of curiosity.
Nutella
@BroD:
How do you know it’s a “very small number”? That’s a completely unwarranted assumption that makes it sound like you’re minimizing the problem.
Maybe you’re not. Maybe that was just a poor choice of words but I’d be more confident of that if you had anywhere mentioned the necessity for vigorous and complete investigation to find all the guilty parties, however many they are.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@mistermix: Well, I don’t know how you frame something other than moving forward? Why is it assumed that the victims are not part of the healing process? There is no question that the institution should and will be damaged.
russell
What wound has a Penn State undergrad suffered, that needs “healing”?
WTF does it mean for them to “be there” for the victims? What “there” are they being in, exactly?
Are they “feeling their pain”?
If they want to “be there for the victims” they can start by supporting the Trustee’s decision to clear the decks.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@mistermix: I’m sorry but I agree with everything you say and I also think that it is moving forward.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@russell: Yea, none of this terminology has ever been used before, it was all made up just for this situation. How the fuck do you know “they” haven’t supported the Trustee’s decision?
PurpleGirl
@Joel: What does “moving forward” even mean? Something happened. But life continues, unless we mean that after that something happened everybody just stopped living, eating, sleeping, going to school, whatever. So what does “moving forward” mean? And what does or can it mean to THE VICTIM — the child or children who were raped and abused? The students are not victims, the teachers and administrators of the school are not victims. The ONLY victim is the child (or children) raped and abused.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@PurpleGirl: And you somehow get out of this that someone think that is not the case?
Breezeblock
Did I hear on NPR this morning, that investigators have McQueary’s email that he said he made sure the shower rape stopped before he left the PSU facility?
Walker
The problem with “moving forward” is that, even though it has a legitimate meaning, it is all to often code for “no one should have to suffer repercussions for their actions.”
bjacques
The skepticism about “moving forward” is deserved. It’s cant that gets rolled out every time a scandal gets too big to contain. See also: “draw a line under it,” and “let’s not get into the blame game.”
It’s really moving forward if it’s in the direction of honest self-assessment with the result that justice is done and nothing like this is possible in the future. The students can move forward if they can be sure that the above is true.
Otherwise, it’s just scuttling away.
[ETA] @25 Walker:
Beat me to it. But I thought “I take full responsibility” means “I’ll take the bullet because there are no consequences for me.”
WereBear
I think this post by mistermix points up the It’s all about meeeeeeeeeeeee that so much of this carrying on is about. It’s not about the football; any more than the shocking laxity of the Red Cross not testing for HIV in the blood supply means we shouldn’t stop giving blood.
However, any mention about “what was lost” that does not mention what the victims lost is self-serving crap. I’m sorry your idols have feet of clay; but that’s what idols are like.
More from Mr. Pierce:
Nutella
@bjacques:
See also: “Look forward, not backward”
RSA
Basically, metaphors are not working very well for Penn State. How many people hear “We need to move forward” and interpret it as meaning “We need to get past this”? Especially with the Daily Collegian’s “return to normalcy” line? It’s just not appropriate.
I’d lean more toward “We need to stop and take stock.” But then the natural response is “What are you going to do right now?”
No one really cares what I think, but if I were king of Penn State, I’d shut the football program down, as a way to make it easier to figure out exactly what happened, root out any problems that may still remain hidden, and decide on policies to prevent future problems. This would screw the Penn State brand name, and the university’s finances would take a huge hit, but it would be a lot more obvious what moving forward from that point would mean.
mistermix
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): So what you’re saying is that you’re able to understand the basic point I’m making, and you agree that PSU should experience extremely dire consequences for what happened there, yet you’re going to continue the linguistic nitpicking? Seems a little troll-y to me.
Gin & Tonic
I wish they’d quote a student saying “I’m going to go to class and study, because I’m here to get an education and a degree and I have no responsibility for Sandusky or Paterno or McQueary or Spanier.” Because that’s the fact. The average, say, mechanical engineering undergrad has as much connection with the raped children (and bears about as much responsibility) as with the victims of the Japanese tsunami.
Bob
@PurpleGirl: It means ‘please don’t level our football program’.
Someguy
@BroD:
This is like arguing that the government should never have gone after Enron, just because a few executives are corrupt. As far as I’m concerned, DOJ should be up there, locking the place out with marshalls and turning it upside down until all the corruptions is rooted out. Professors can get new jobs, students can transfer, and football players can go find another school with a football team and a basket weaving curriculum. State government officials, including that croooked governor, should face hearings about what they knew and when they knew it, because there’s no way that somebody this prominent with a huge charitable organization was corrupt, without the state’s power infrastructure knowing about it (and it raises the question of Madden’s article, about whether Sandusky was pimping young boys to rich donors.) I am certain that more people were in on the coverup, and maybe even in on the wilder allegations. The place is no different from Enron, Lehman Brothers, the Republican Party, or any other thoroughly corrupt institution in our society. We shouldn’t make excuses for them, we should shut them down.
harlana
If only it were that easy, but it’s not.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@mistermix:Well just excuse me.
Nutella
@Gin & Tonic:
Depends on whether the hypothetical student was out rioting in favor of Paterno or otherwise showing that he’s in favor of sweeping this whole ‘scandal’ under the rug. Then he’s complicit.
PurpleGirl
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Well, from the way the Penn State community held that prayer service before the game and the spotlight on the current students, and Sandusky and Paterno and how they are all hurting, it seems that some people have lost the focus on the child/children who were abused.
I don’t give a crap about Paterno and his “pain”. I care that those who covered up a (alleged, until a trial is held and a potential conviction) crime suffer the consequences for what they did.
Ilia
@Gin & Tonic: “go to class and study”? Lol, this is Penn State we’re talking about, not a real school.
Bob
@Nutella: Being in favor of Paterno AND sweeping this under the rug are the same thing. Hiding it under the rug is what Paterno has done since 1998.
Robin G.
“We need to move forward” = “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Tough shit.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@PurpleGirl: I meant here.
PurpleGirl
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Oh, you meant here at BJ? That’s not how I read your comment.
Robin G.
By the way, if desiring a cross-section of non-filtered PSU perspective, there’s the SN blog blackshoediaries (dot) com. The blog itself has been decent, but the comment threads…
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@PurpleGirl: Yea, and I also think, in a linguistic nitpicking sort of way, that there is a hell of a lot of difference between “moving on” and “moving forward”
geg6
@cinesimon:
Something that could only be said by someone that knows absolutely nothing at all about Penn State except what they’ve read or seen in the media.
Suffern ACE
How long should the students and faculty be placed in the box before they should be allowed to contemplate moving at all?
Lori
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, I noticed that too! In addition to all the other wrongnesses coming to light: What the hell was the director of the Second Mile doing making a salary of $133,000? And his wife making 6 figures working there, too. Clearly they weren’t protecting the kids. And the donors probably didn’t know how much of their money was going to ‘administration’, versus actual care for the kids. I wonder what the percentages were, in terms of how high a percentage of donations were used for administration costs.
Heez
Let’s see here. Take one part liberal anti-sports elitism and mix it with one part self-righteous victim fetishization and voila; Collective guilt.
It’s an old recipe with a new twist!
geg6
@BroD:
There are few here who believe that. It’s been nothing but bashing of the “cow college” academics, accusations of a lack of any sort academic credibility among its peers, and holding the entire student body, faculty, and staff accountable. Accountable for things they knew nothing about, are horrified by, can feel nothing but compassion for the victims of this man and his enablers and determination to never allow such things to happen again (not only here, but within the larger community), and wish to work to make sure that the university begins the long process of proving through its actions that it is more than what these individuals and their actions have made it seem to be.
The idea that too many have is that we should punish past, current, and future students, faculty, and staff, simply by proximity. There is, apparently, no acceptance of anything other than collective guilt for the tens of thousands of us, where we should be thankful that we haven’t all been forced to hang our heads in shame for the rest of our lives, never do anything with our lives and resources other than think about this case and forget anything else like education or research or teaching, and blow up all 24 campuses and salt the earth, preferably salt from our dried up tears.
I hate what happened to those kids. I hate that people with authority (not ever a trusted entity to me) at my place of work covered up such horrific crimes. I hate that too many students and alumni don’t quite get it. Not even close to a large minority, but still. However, I also hate that too many are willing to require the collective guilt that mistermix and many others seem to feel is only just.
Llelldorin
Without the histrionics, it’s fairly clear that the institution under discussion is PSU Football, not PSU itself.
It’s also fairly clear that there are probably many respectable options between “blow up all 24 campuses” and the “we feel really, really bad, but now it’s time for the Nebraska game so STFU” that seems to be the preferred option in State College.
But go ahead and keep ranting about collective guilt when we’re talking about not going on with football as usual after the program covered up child rapes. You’re making mistermix’s point better than he every could.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Llelldorin: Uh huh, you hit it right on the head:
Amir Khalid
Things are not normal at Penn State. Football, as a source of prestige and profit, was allowed to override common decency. A football coach raped children on university premises. His bosses learned about it, and either made only a token effort or none at all to stop him. Two of them are accused of lying to conceal his crimes. Two more have been fired. It was the institution that failed its moral duty. It is the institution that must do penance. Nocera’s five-point checklist seems to cover what has to be done.
Like Pierce says, the full extent of those crimes needs to go on the record. The victims deserve both financial compensation and whatever mitigation is possible of the lasting harm they have suffered. Penn State should not get to “move forward” and regain its good name before these things are taken care of.
Yes, many, even most people at Penn State are blameless as individuals in all this; anything bad that happens to Penn State because of this will happen to them too. But you can’t make that an argument against what needs to happen at Penn State to atone for this. The alternative is to let Penn State slide by.
eemom
@Gin & Tonic:
Totally this. Seriously, what are you “how dare you utter the words ‘move on'” people suggesting — that the hundreds of thousands of students paying for an education just roll over and play dead? Let’s assume for the moment that they didn’t ALL riot in favor of Papa Joe last week.
Tractarian
No, this is like arguing that the janitor at Enron should be thrown in jail for the misdeeds of the CEO.
geg6 gets it right:
To tar completely innocent college students and faculty (I mean really innocent – not just legally innocent like Paterno) with complicity in child abuse is disgusting. And that’s what you’re doing.
geg6
@Llelldorin:
Perhaps it’s clear to you, but as Raven correctly point out, that is not what mistermix said. The only people who are seeming to advocate for the idea that Saturday’s game was about telling everyone to STFU were some of the coaches and the media, especially the sports media. FWIW, I don’t expect to see many of these coaches being kept on by the university after the season is over, so I don’t find them very relevant to anything right now. The rest of the university is not under any kind of illusion that we’re moving on and there’s nothing here to see. You aren’t here, you don’t know anything other than what you see in the same media that made the Tea Party the political force that it is instead of the farce that they actually are.
slippy
Argh. I remember sitting at BDubs the day this broke, and the vapid morons at every sports news desk in existence were all hanging on whatever St. Joe Paterno was going to do next.
God-damn I was happy to see they fired his arrogant ass the next day. Boy, he certainly was asking for it.
I don’t know if I have mentioned today how much I hate school sports programs, because they siphon resources away from real education, and make heroes and idols out of inferior men who really have nothing on their agendas but self-aggrandizement. Pathetic, disgusting, and beneath us.
Three-nineteen
@geg6: Penn State as a whole needs to suffer some pretty serious consequences. If it doesn’t, the next college this happens at (and it will) will just cover it up again, because the upside of not telling will outweigh the downside.
And I think I’ve read every comment in every Penn State thread on this site, and I have not seen any comments bashing “cow college” academics. Having graduated from one, I think I would have noticed.
As for “we should be thankful that we haven’t all been forced to hang our heads in shame for the rest of our lives, never do anything with our lives and resources other than think about this case and forget anything else”, it’s been a week. I think you might want to take at least 1% of the time Sandusky allegedly used Penn State to rape children and reflect on how it was handled. If you count 1998 as the first instance and 2009 as the last, 1% would be about 6 weeks. You can start crying about how wrongly you’ve been treated after that.
sb
That Pierce column? Terrific. Thanks for the link.
daveNYC
@Gin & Tonic:
Yeah, because what Penn State needs right now is a quote from an undergrad that basically sounds (sounds like, not is) like “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”
And Joe Bob the generic Mech Eng major is going to get hammered by this. Everyone at the school will. The civil suits are going to hammer the schools finances like crazy, and the state will probably let the place hang.
CarolDuhart2
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): More importantly, can it move on? This is early days. How many more do we have to learn about this. There are the trials to come (just how many of those?) Questions that will have to be answered about the depth of the college’s involvement, who knew what when, and how long was Jerry actually molesting.
And all the while these revelations will be coming out, Penn State will be hit with wave after wave of bad publicity, and no telling how bad the complete situation happens to be. There will be lawsuits as well as trials.
As for the money, how many advertisers are going to want to be associated with Penn State? At least the Catholic Church and similar institutions don’t rely on advertising dollars and tv time. What about the sales of memorabilia beyond the students of the school? A hidden secret is that Colleges sell stuff to people who have never attended but who like the team or its reputation. That adds to the value of the brand. Who’s going to buy and wear them now?
The Penn State students need to face reality on this one, and instead of “moving on” ask for clarity and healing.
Quincy
Anyone ever read Disgrace by Coetzee? A poorly distilled summary is that it’s about the aftermath of a rape which serves as a metaphor for the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa. Anyway, it’s just a phenomenal book and movingly speaks to what (I think) Mistermix and a lot of people are saying here. When atrocities happen, there is no adequate response. No commission will ever fully close the book on the crime. No policy change corrects what happened. Healing will very possibly never happen for the victims, the perpetrators and the enablers, and everyone else impacted needs to understand that. That’s not to say you cease everything and vow never to be happy again. Life continues and you navigate the aftermath of an atrocity as best you can. But trite statements about “healing” something that can never be healed only trivialize what happened. They reflect a lack of understanding of what happened.
geg6
@Three-nineteen:
Well, apparently you didn’t read them all as there were several threads where people had to provide evidence of the academic excellence at PSU. I’m not going to look them up and link them, but you are straight out wrong here.
As for your being judge and jury about what penalties innocent people should pay, that says more about you than any of this says about me.
Yes, the university will pay, in many ways, for all of this. I will personally pay for this, as a taxpayer of PA, a donor to the university scholarship fund, and as an employee who will, no doubt, not see another raise in my career. If that’s what it takes to make things a bit better for the victims and to bring the university back to its mission of educating, I’m fine with that. But quit blaming me, other employees, and students and making it out that we have some sort of moral culpability in any of it. We don’t, but we’re already doing what we can to try to help alleviate future suffering:
http://www.centredaily.com/2011/11/14/2985674/funding-rolls-in-for-victims.html
CarolDuhart2
@Tractarian: But the janitor lost his job at Enron. The students will lose a lot because of this, even though it’s not their fault these things happened. It’s like living next door to a toxic dump: there are consequences even though the neighbors didn’t dump the stuff and didn’t own the property on which it was dumped.
Enough with the self-pity. Yes, it’s going to be rough for a very long time. And whether you like it or not, there will be no real football for a long time to come.
Llelldorin
@geg6
On what do you base this expectation? Assuming the story dies down as the legal process begins to grind on, wouldn’t firing the other coaches just generate a negative news cycle?
Without institutional consequences (and specifically consequences to Penn State Football, not to the university itself), why wouldn’t the football program cheerfully revert to their status quo ante prestige and importance, while quietly using your next ten years’ worth of raises to pay off the lawsuits?
Alex
@eemom: Obviously, the answer is officially licensed PSU hair shirts.
Nutella
@Llelldorin:
That’s what they mean by “moving on”.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@CarolDuhart2: Moving on and moving forward are not the same.
Three-nineteen
@geg6: The only thing I judged was your whining about how people are STILL complaining about Penn State after an entire WEEK. I know about being judged – I work for a pharmaceutical company. I get to hear all the time about how terrible my company and industry is, how we only care about money and let people die or just flat-out murder them because we lie about side effects and cover up data that might make us lose money. I have personally suffered when another division in my company has broken the law, and even though my division had nothing to do with it, the entire corporation was punished. I have suffered when my division did something wrong (not illegal, judged wrong by the FDA), even though I personally had nothing to do with it. That’s how it works.
russell
“F–k the Trustees”
“We want Joe”
etc.
I’m sure it’s been a crappy couple of weeks at State College.
But I’m also fairly sure that losing your football coach and being bent over and f**ked up the @ss in the shower by your football coach are not really commensurate experiences.
So, I find the talk about “healing” and “being there for the victims” kind of weak.
cinesimon
Poor little butt-hurt Penn staters.
I really feel your pain…
cinesimon
Raven you seem to think that because you have seen one student talk about the victims, that makes the entire disgusting display going on there fully debunked.
I mean, grow up.
We have eyes and ears. We see and hear what the vast majority of people interviewed are saying.
If you want to pretend that Penn State and the community aren’t trying to get back to business as usual, you go ahead and fool yourself. You’re not going to convince anyone with your righteous trolling and see-no-evil attitude.
pseudonymous in nc
That’s a reasonable position, and I think that Pierce’s sentiments are dead-on. But I think it’s equally reasonable that the student body at State College — 40-odd thousand, a smallish city’s worth — collectively lacks the vocabulary to address the implosion of the campus’s defining institutional framework, and ends up resorting to the vapid clichés of closure and healing. So while I agree with Quincy @61 that the talk right now is pretty cheap, I’m not sure what’s productively gained by demanding some unspecified self-mortification from a large group of young people that are very obviously in the early stages of Kübler-Ross.
makarov
A question not often asked, so far, is, “Why did this case, once referred to the Attorney General’s office, take over 2 1/2 years to result in an indictment?”
Thankfully, Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who originally broke the story, is asking this question.
Why did the investigation take so long?
I think Governor Tom Corbett has some more questions to answer.
aimai
There’s a great scene in the new movie Margin Call where one character, whose hands are by no means clean in the financial misdealings of the firm, walks out of a meeting and refuses to listen to what the others are plotting. They ask him why he’s leaving and he says that its safer for him to be ignorant of what they actually know or discuss “How do you think I stayed at this firm for 29 years?” He asks them as he walks out.
Basically, although a whole lot of people have to have been complicit in the Pen State situation a very large number of them will be found to have kept sufficient distance between themselves and any accurate knowledge that they will skate and also will never, ever, acknowledge their guilt and complicity.
aimai
eric72
Loved that NBC decided to get Jerry Sandusky on the phone during last night’s Rock Center broadcast. What a great idea! Maybe this could be an on-going segment on the show: “Let’s Dial Up a Child Rapist!”
aimai
@pseudonymous in nc:
I never got a chance to say this anywhere but pseudonymous’s point reminds me that we have to realize that in dealing with this situation we are dealing with a small principality or city/state in which there was, in fact, a divine emperor and his name was Paterno. That being the case if we wanted the best outcome for the students/citizens and the non complicit faculty what really would need to happen is what happened when Japan surrendered to the US. The US actually consulted with anthropologists on this one and determined that Hirohito himself would have to surrender for the Japanese people to recognize that the war was over.
It could never have happened this way because of our liability laws and because there’s no conquering force but if I’d been the Trustees and the President and I’d had the ability to do it I’d have made Paterno apologize, admit fault, and explain that the football team was being shut down because none of the coaches had demonstrated, under his lack of leadership, the ability to actually protect and teach their student athletes. Instead of rioting by the students you would have had mourning and reflection.
That’s a counterfactual. None of the usual apologists need to bother to explain to me why that didn’t happen. Its obvious that in modern America it could never have happened. but that’s precisely why everything that does happen at that school is going to be second best until Paterno’s divine leadership role falls of its own weight under the onslaught of the obvious testimony over the next few years.
aimai
lofistew
As for Sandusky’s charity, Second Mile, Chicago radio host Dan Bernstein reported yesterday that a whopping 77 percent of donations went toward staff salaries.
The place wasn’t designed to help kids, it was designed as a victim farm for Sandusky.
@PSU
I don’t think this is necessarily the case. One of the major goals of a conspiracy is to keep the knowledge as contained as possible. And a culture like Penn State’s – where people are promoted for toadyism and punished for questioning authority – there is frankly no purpose in spreading the knowledge around. Because no one is going to ask questions.
Sandusky was “family” and there was no way the participants were going to turn him over to the police. They were going to deal with them in their own way. And I’m sure they were very pleased with themselves for having (they thought) brushed the whole thing under the rug.
Those of us who are here know the score. But there are cohorts here who are either trying to escape responsibility and/or punishment or whose livelihood hangs in the balance. Those people are desperately trying to change the subject. Many of us are not.
Kathy
I have this overwhelming urge to say to every Penn Stater that talks about “moving on” and “healing” this:
“You healed and moved on, goody for you, now shut the f*ck up and stay out of this discussion. None of this is about you anymore.”
pseudonymous in nc
@aimai: for all of Jefferson’s desire to have no titles of nobility in America, it’s worth reflecting on the reverence granted to the appellation “Coach”. Paterno was the last of the Coach-Potentates.
russell
That’s a very fair point. The issues the Penn Staters are dealing with are actually pretty distressing. Loss of faith in folks they trusted, undermining of the key institutions that make up the fabric of their lives. Those are hard things to talk about.
I don’t really expect or demand anything along the lines of self-mortification from the young folks at State College. They didn’t assault or rape anyone, they did not cover anything up, they did not fail to carry out their moral and legal responsibilities to the kids involved.
I’m also not insensitive to the impact this is having on the college community. I will admit it seems a little weird to me to have that much invested in a football program, but then I’m just not that into sports. But I recognize that it’s a very big deal to the folks there.
I have one and only one point.
As big of a deal as it is to the campus community, it’s a much bigger deal to the kids who were actually abused, and it seems to me that it would be, for lack of a better word, more seemly for the UPA undergrads to recognize that and have a little perspective.
If you are involved in car wreck through no fault of your own, and your car is totalled, but the folks in the other car are all killed, it’s bad form to stand around crying about how much you really loved that car.
It’s a matter of perspective, and having sufficient self-awareness and awareness of other folks to understand that, crappy as your end of the deal is, it’s nothing compared to what other folks are dealing with.
geg6
@@PSU:
I agree with what you say wholeheartedly. The only people here at the university who are looking to sweep this under the rug are those who are or may be implicated. The rest of us are looking around and saying what can we do to help both the victims as they relive this horror and the university community to cope with the new reality.
I guess I have to try to understand that some people are going to be too closed-minded and adamant in their own self-righteousness to see anything but the very worst in anyone or anything connected with PSU for quite a while. And it’s much easier to do this in an online forum than it is in person, which is why, I guess, it only seems to happen here.
labradog
Now, if somebody tells me they attended or graduated from Penn State, I regard them in the same way as if they told me they spent 5 years in the House of Correction.
The Penn State rot goes from the tippy-top all the way down to the student body.
P.S. Screw collegiate and high school athletics programs. They are, at best, jerk factories.
geg6
@labradog:
So, once again I must pose this question to someone (who I must say I’ve never seen around here) here:
So all 90,000 students and 20,000 employees at all 24 campuses and millions of alumni worldwide are no different than murderers and rapists and terrorists simply by virtue of working for or attending Penn State.
Gotcha.
quagmiremonkey
Has Mistermix expressed similar outrage over the Obama administration’s explicit policy of preemptively forgiving and forgetting when it comes to US torture policy?
HBin
@Three-nineteen: Yup. I’m surprised at geg6’s victimization complex. He/she is usually more reasonable than this when commenting on other subjects. But I guess it’s not surprising, everyone wants to protect their livelihood after all. Not surprising, but disappointing in this case, since I used to enjoy reading geg6’s comments.