Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach, has died.
I can’t help but wonder if the travesty of the last few months, with his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, being charged with sexually molesting 10 young boys over 15 years, killed him.
I’m not an alumna of Penn State. (I am, however, an alumna of Syracuse University, with its own scandal of an assistant basketball coach allegedly molesting boys.) Still, I hate to see the storied career of Joe Paterno forever blackened by the malevolent behavior of one man, if that proves to be the case.
Some people argue that Paterno had to know what was going on. They argue that Paterno was so concerned about his legacy, the reputation of his football program and Penn State University, that he was willing to turn a blind eye to the behavior of Jerry Sandusky.
I’m not so sure.
Since the scandal broke in November, Joe Paterno has given only one interview, to Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. The story was published on January 14, 2012. It characterizes Joe Paterno as unable to comprehend what Sandusky may have done, because it was simply too foreign to the way Paterno himself lived his life. Jenkins writes:
He reiterated that McQueary was unclear with him about the nature of what he saw and added that even if McQueary had been more graphic, he’s not sure he would have comprehended it.
“You know, he didn’t want to get specific,” Paterno said. “And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
Is it possible to be that unaware of the existence of evil? Yes, it is, and we all know it.
While I was uninitiated, meaning, before my direct, personal encounter with a social predator, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would cross paths with evil. I didn’t know that someone who appeared to be so loving and caring could have a hidden agenda. I lived a life of integrity, and I believed that the people who were part of my life were like me.
But, some may argue, sex abuse of children has been in the news for years—look at the stories about the Catholic Church. Well, my cousin was abused by priests. He received financial compensation many years ago—it was probably one of the first cases to be settled. I heard people in my family talking about it. Still, I did not comprehend what he must have experienced.
I didn’t understand the human capacity for manipulation and evil until it happened to me.
So, yes, I can believe that Joe Paterno was clueless. He grew up in a different era, when although the sexual abuse of children probably occurred, it certainly wasn’t talked about. He was inspired by his father. He believed in education. He believed in turning troubled athletes around. His whole life was about winning with integrity.
So for Paterno to realize, at this late stage of his life, that he may have been hoodwinked by someone so close to him must have been a terrible shock. It probably didn’t cause his lung cancer. But it may have sapped Paterno’s strength to fight it.
Read Joe Paterno’s last interview, on WashingtonPost.com.
Biggirl Justus, people don’t “step up” and do something because they are afraid – simply that: afraid.
My mother did everything that she could not to piss off the first exspath because she KNEW that he wouldn’t facilitate visits with her grandchildren if she made so much as a squeek of disapproval.
Skylar, EXACTLY!!!!! That they “always leave someone else holding the bag” is 100% accurate. I never experienced the exspaths (either of them) stand accountable for ANYthing, whether it was threatening me with murder/suicide, or not balancing the accounts and failing to pay a bill. It’s always – always – someone else’s fault.
They are not sure who originally said this or in what version, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/ but the message is always the same:
All it takes for evil to triumph (prevail) is for good men to do nothing.
Oxy, your feelings about your son, C, are pretty much the reasons why I won’t have anything to do with my brother. I am done with him as well.
He literally will not look at the court documents pertaining to what my P sister did to me and my son. Instead, he now has my P sister listed on his website for his CHILDREN’S BOOK as his education expert.
How’s that for denial and “I hope she won’t come after me?”
I know the situation. He thinks he’s not taking sides, but boy, is he ever. The thing that is certain is that he doesn’t care enough about me or my son to work at establishing a relationship with us. The h3ll with them all.
Grace, I agree completely with that quote and you know there are so many people who “don’t want to make someone mad” or to stand up for the right because someone might get offended.
The Kitty Genovese murder where dozens of people watched and did nothing, not even call the cops where she was being murdered over a half hour period I believe it was.
Researchers went after the “why” of this and they decided that the reason was that when there is a crowd of people like that everyone else expects someone else to do something so they do nothing.
Remember the poem about the “hangman”? I can’t remember who wrote it or the exact name but the poem goes on about the hangman comes for X, then for Y and the gallows gets bigger and bigger and eventually there is only ONE man left and the hangman comes for HIM….but all the time when the hangman was hanging his neighbors, he did nothing and when the hangman came for him there was no one to save him.
When the “hangman” (my son Patrick) came for son C, THEN and ONLY then did he get the message about what kind of person he was dealing with. BUT all the time he had been dealing with the carp patrick and the Trojan Horse Psycho0path were doing, he KNEW IT WAS WRONG, HE KNEW IT WAS TO DRIVE ME OUT OF MY HOME (I don’t think he knew about the intention to kill me, but I don’t think it would have made any difference if he had known) and he DID nothing….but the when the gun literally was pointed at his head and the TH-P jacked a round into the chamber, then he about shiat himself and “got religion”—-but when he lied to me again, I got to thinking about all the OTHER TIMES he had sat silent when his brother robbed us, robbed our friends, and so on and he said NOTHING even when he knew his brother was stealing our car at night and using it to haul the loot he stole from our friends’ business.
Even if he had not participated in these things he knew about them and he did not warn us. What kind of “friend” much less a son would not warn their parents when someone was doing this? Well, all I can say is NOT MUCH OF ONE.
When I realized my egg donor was in danger I literally BEGGED her on my knees, crying my heart out, to listen to me and get the TH-P out of her house….if my son C had truly loved me and cared about me, he would have done the same thing when he realized they were trying to hurt me. Instead, what did he do? He said, when I asked him about the TH-P jacking with my phone account and credit card accounts and he said “welllllll, I told him not to do it.” BUT he didn’t warn me and he didn’t stop the man….until his own life was on the line.
Fence sitters and enablers are as dangerous as psychopaths because they allow them to continue to brutalize the victim. They watch, but do not help the victim. Then, the hangman comes for THEM.
I have never heard of that poem. I just looked it up. It’s called “The Hangman” by Maurice Ogden. It’s v. powerful. Thank-you for sharing, Oxy.
I love that poem too. It says so much, so eloquently.
Oxy, I’ve been perplexed for a long time about your son C and people like him. He doesn’t fit the profile of people like Paterno and the other CEO’s who just don’t care enough to get their hands dirty. They, Paterno and his ilk, are more like Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands because it was politically expedient. I think you described your son accurately when you said he was a “follower”. He fits the profile of the crowds who watched and jeered as Jesus was crucified, the roman mobs at the Colosseum, the aztec crowds watching the sacrificial victims get led up the pyramid steps. His type is the majority.
They actually like watching other people “get their comeuppance” but they would never be one to instigate it. When they feel happy at someone else’s dismay, it’s called schadenfreude. What a spath feels is called malice. The only difference, IMO, is how much hand they had in creating the circumstances. A spath is the ring leader, while the follower just stands and watches with glee.
Honestly, sometimes I think I hate the followers more than the spaths. They’re more pathetic.
I have never heard of that poem before. I did a search on it. I found an animated version of it on YouTube, but it was too heavy-handed for me to watch. I didn’t read the poem through, either. I know as much as I want to know about it at this point.
The YouTube clip had, as something else to look at, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s song about Hangman. That song told about the soon-to-be executed man seeing people coming that he thought would save him, but they had just come to watch him die. Finally, his true love shows up and she rescues him.
I was a little kid when that song came out, but I remember being horrified wondering how could family members do nothing while another family member was to be executed? Who would do such a thing? What kind of family was that? Oxy, we sure found out the hard way, didn’t we?
I remember my mother telling me that General Eisenhower, when they first liberated the death camps, ordered his soldiers to take films of the conditions and people that they found because he knew there would be people who would say that the conditions weren’t that bad or that the death camps never happened. He was right.
Watching public executions has long been “entertainment” throughout history. It was only in the 20th century that we stopped executing people publicly, and it wasn’t everywhere.
Oxy, I didn’t know that Japan did that to the Chinese. I heard that there were atrocities, but the press sanitizes everything. Guess they think we are too delicate to take the news or it could be controlling the public. Keep people fooled that the world is a beautiful and peaceful place and the common folk won’t rise up in protest and alarm.
It really depends on where you live and what the culture is like.
I have a friend who collects murder mysteries. He told me that in the US, the victims are found face-up, but in England, they are found face-down so that the observers don’t have to look at dead faces. In third-world countries were there are so many poor and the cultures are pretty lawless, murder is almost a non-issue. Very little is done about people killing others because that is how the government maintains control in many of these places.
Again, I think it is a public education issue. We just are not taught what our actions to do others. The closest that we have to anything are classes taught about bullying, but they are inconsistent in their message and they are not widespread.
Kudos for Donna for her course that she teaches to high school students about Ps.
Sky, I agree with you about the fence-sitters and the followers. Don’t they come across as holier-than-thous because they justify themselves by saying that they never did those horrible things, but what did they do to stop them or make the perpetrators accountable? I swear that in most cases the answer is, “Oh, I don’t have any control over that. What can I do? Let the authorities handle that situation.”
Wasn’t there a famous Lil’ Abner cartoon where one of the characters said, “We have seen the enemy, and it is us?”
That’s a whole lot of of very interesting information, G1S. Esp what Eisenhower did. I didn’t know that. It speaks volumes about human nature.
And I am in total agreement about the fencesitters, too. They make me fume. I deeply believe that we are responsible for one another on this earth. Esp when it comes to children and protecting them; also the fatherless, the widows. We don’t get to sit stuff like this out, we don’t get to sit on the bench. I kept telling this to people like my N mom, she just doesn’t get it. She says lv it up to God, it’ll sort itself out.
All this talk about the Hangman and community or cultural shame and blame is making me think of the Shirley Jackson story, “The Lottery.” It isn’t only the natural world that is red in tooth in claw. This thread is intense.
I listened to that song from Peter, Paul, and Mary. So sad, even the last two lines, when one doesn’t have a “lover.”
Parallelogram, I get irritated with fence-sitters, as well, but I try to keep in mind how I got to this site. I don’t like it, but people do it, and I reckon it’s a part of the Human Condition that will never change.
“The Lottery” had an enormous impact upon me when I read it as a youngster. Since this was in the year 17;BT (Before Technology), I was thoroughly involved in the story. The horror and disbelief stuck with me for a long, long time, and I can still recall how uncomfortable I felt as it unfolded.
G1S, the Nanking Massacre was absolutely horrific. There was a movie that Katherine Hepburn did that sort of skirted the event but spoke to the Japanese invasion of China.
Even today, with the photojournalistic documentation and eye-witness accounts, the Japanese (as a Nation) have never stood accountable or even acknowledged that this event ever took place.
I visited a website that gave the history of this event, and I couldn’t view most of the photos – they were just too gruesome.
Grace, that was POGO cartoon that said that I think.
“History is written by the winner” was an old phrase, but you know, History is also RE-written by the losers sometimes as well.
In the case of WWII that is essentially the case. The Japanese write about and show pictures of the nuke attack…show stats of how many were killed etc (of course mostly civilians it is true) but they don’t acknowledge that more than TWICE as many civilians were killed in Nanking by their troops and tortured and mutilated.
War is “not nice” that is a fact. I think it brings out the psychopathic attitudes and traits…like our soldiers who cut off fingers as trophies and posed for photos with corpses in Iraq.
People who are rabid about one religion or culture and are willing to kill others because they do not believe the same way are to me exhibiting the psychopathic tendencies that the human race still harbors…and some or all of us can have brought out in us by a situation. I know that many if not all of us have aggressive issues that can be brought out if we are provoked in just the right way, but at the same time, there are also altruistic aspects too.
I think that we must learn to live within our own consciences and be able to face our own mirrors and our own Gods. The problem with psychopaths is that they don’t have a conscience and their own self is their god.