I'm Just Sharing

I know someone out there has been saying “Is Mitch afraid to have a take on what’s going on at Penn State and with Joe Paterno”? Who me, scared to have a take on something? Ain’t no way! It’s not going to be overwhelmingly popular, but I don’t care; it’s my take.

A little quick history for those of you who aren’t up on this or aren’t from this country. Last weekend it came to light that a former football coach had been accused of molesting young boys initially about 13 or 14 years ago. Then around 2001 or 2002 an assistant football coach told his head coach, Joe Paterno, that he’d actually seen the guy doing something with a young boy in a shower. The head coach passed the information along to the people he reported to, the coach was dismissed, and somehow that ended things.

Only it didn’t end things. Last weekend it comes out that the two men Coach Paterno had reported the incident to had been called before a grand jury and asked about these things, and they had lied about it. They were arrested for keeping their silence and for lying, as child molestation is a big deal. Suddenly however, it threw Coach Paterno into the mix because many people believe he should have gone to the police with his information instead of just following the rules of his state, which said that he was under no legal obligation to do so and instead reporting it to his superiors. The assistant coach who’d seen the action also didn’t report it to the police, following the same process the head coach did.

This turned out not to be good enough for the representatives of the university, who this week fired the coach, who is 84 years old and has been coaching at the school for 62 years and had been head coach for 46 of those years, fired the president of the college, who I assume had some knowledge of this issue and didn’t do anything, and put the assistant coach who brought it up to begin with on paid administrative leave for some reason, although it seems his life was being threatened for not going to the police either.

Word has subsequently come out saying that this coach has not only “allegedly” molested at least 9 children (possibly tens of kids but nine “confirmed” accusations to date), but may have run kind of a (ugh) child prostitution ring, doling out young boys to rich people; it gets more and more disgusting as it goes on. So, this is truly a major deal, and it’s tarnished a program that, as far as anyone knows, has never done anything wrong that the school has been accused of, especially the head coach, always known for being overtly moral in all his dealings.

Okay, that’s some history, and I hope I got it all right. Here come my takes on everything.

One, some people needed to be fired. The two men that have been accused of lying to the grand jury, strangely enough, resigned rather than being fired. Supposedly the university couldn’t fire them for some reason but they knew what was coming. The president was fired because he basically said he and the university would stand fully behind these two men; the board of trustees didn’t like that.

Two, I’m not sure it was totally fair to fire the head coach. I certainly know it wasn’t fair to fire a man who personified the best the university had to offer for as long as he did via a cell phone call. If this man didn’t deserve the dignity of being told to his face that he was being relieved from his job I don’t know who did. That was a cowardly act and I deplore that kind of disloyalty. On the other front, the coach had announced earlier in the day that he would resign at the end of the year; after 62 years he didn’t deserve that much?

Three, did the coach have the responsibility of calling the police to report an action he was told about? This is an interesting morality question, since legally it seems he didn’t do anything wrong by the laws of the state of Pennsylvania. On this one I pull out two scenarios, both of them true in my life.

One, I have a friend who was accused a couple of times of molesting his own daughter when she was younger. These accusations were the result of a custody battle, but the police had to investigate each time. I know Dr. Phil says that when it comes to children everyone should take the action to protect them but there’s always this stigma that sticks around someone accused of this sort of thing, even when it’s proven not to be true, and it wasn’t true for my friend. So, is it fair to totally stigmatize someone who you didn’t see doing something?

Two, what about other types of abuse you know is happening? I’ve known a few women over the years that I’ve worked with that I knew were being physically abused at home. They’d come to work with bruises and say things like they fell down the stairs or ran into a door or something else stupid. I wanted to step in a couple of times but was always told not to interfere. The only thing I was ever able to do was ban this one guy from coming into the hospital at all unless he was coming into the emergency room as a patient. Someone’s going to say “you should have called anyway”; trust me, it’s not that easy to do because the victim, and I’m going to use that term, will almost always side with their abuser, and it makes you look bad.

Three, and be truthful with yourselves, how many of you would take the chance of stepping outside of the chain of command where you work and going directly to the police based on something someone told you? If the assistant coach who saw it went to the police because he’d seen it, that’s one thing. If you’re being told something yet didn’t see it, and you report it, basically it’s just hearsay, so you end up following company rules, which are to move it up to the chain of command. Now, if either of those two other guys hadn’t lied during the grand jury testimony, this whole thing would have gone away and people would be praising the coach for speaking up in the first place.

Four, we all might possibly say we’d have done this or that, but it’s a lie. People don’t like getting involved in anything for fear of getting in trouble. It’s turned into a big scandal because people have been confronted with their own reality. Every day in a big city somewhere a person is murdered and hundreds of witnesses disappear. In China two weeks ago a 2-year-old girl was run over twice and no one did a thing for about 10 minutes until a homeless person ran over to her and started calling for help; she died. We see mothers and fathers slapping their children in public places or yelling and cursing at them and we do nothing because we want to avoid becoming their target, or having someone else say it’s none of our business. So the majority can be as sanctimonious as they want to be; I know they’re just being phony.

And five, I can say this because I’ve kind of been there as the protector. In my late teens and through my mid 20′s I was the protector. I was the guy who’d step in the middle of fights for people I knew and protect them. I used to step in ready to take the punch for my friends into my early 30′s and did so without any worry as to what could happen to me; I have witnesses. Online now, if I see a friend of mine being taken on by someone I’ve stepped into the fray; I’ve done it on this blog and on other blogs.

But in general, as I’ve aged, I’ve realized that it’s not always taken well. People say they want help but they really don’t. Is there a moral obligation to help others? Well, ask yourself how you felt the last time someone tried to talk you into joining their religion because they feel it helped them, and now they want to help save your soul. We don’t want help unless we specifically ask for it.

Does this absolve the guy who did what he did? Nope; he’ll get his. Does this absolve the two guys that lied to the grand jury? Nope, and they’ll get theirs. Does this absolve the head coach, Joe Paterno? In my mind, for a number of factors, yes it does. Could he have done more; yes. Should he have done more; probably. Should he be castigated because he followed the rules and did what pretty much 99.93% of the populace would have done? No.

Look at yourselves first and examine your previous actions in things that have been similar, if not as awful as this scandal, then answer truthfully.

Who’s scared now?
 

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