I've been keeping a list of things I keep meaning to blog about- the rest of SNAG, getting to hang out with Erryn Rowan Laurie (still regret not getting that sari!), my crazy summer med issues, the highly surreal experience of going to the ER with an upset stomach & coming out two days later with one less organ than I came in with (gall bladder- good riddance!), my new Snarky Political metals pieces & relating my political activism with my artwork, World War 3 & how much fun it was, great fan-girl moments, minor metals disasters, my photo work, my involvement with the local #Occupy group, etc...
And what do I find myself actually sitting down to write about? Penn State. Largely as a way to sort out my own very complex feelings on the subject.
You see, my parents are/were Penn State Alumni. It's where they met & fell in love. Any time we visited Grandma & Grandpa Smith or Uncle George in Dad's hometown of Pottsville, we'd have to stop & spend a day at State College, where the highlight for us kids was definitely going to the Creamery & getting their amazing ice cream. Years later, when I ran a senior center, we all went to a conference in State College & my co-workers thought I was crazy because I kept talking about getting ice cream & bringing some home with me. They didn't realize that it really was a big thing until we stopped at the Creamy & there were two entrances- one for people getting cones & one for people getting ice cream packed in dry ice to take with them. There was a line of people all waiting for their insulated packages of yummy insanely-high-fat ice creamy goodness. Seriously. Creamery Ice Cream is Nirvana on a spoon. Every time my Aunt brings my cousin home for break, we have standing orders.
Being raised by Penn Staters meant we were also raised with a certain amount of hero-worship for JoePA. He wasn't just a football coach, he was a man who Did The Right Thing. He gave as much back to the University as he got. He did things the way he felt was right & ethical, even as buying up players & shady recruitment deals became more common. He made his players go to class & keep up their GPAs-- something almost unheard of in a lot of college sports. Not only is Paterno the winning-est coach in college football, he's graduated the most players- and I'm fairly certain that it's the later one that he's most proud of. Paterno was a Good Guy and frequently spoken of as if he was somewhere between a hero & a saint.
The fact remains, though, that he is still a human being. People on pedestals all too often fall off them. And even good guys can make the wrong call.
I keep hearing/reading a couple of things over & over. One is, "Why didn't the grad student stop Sandusky?" It's always easy to say what you would do if you were confronted with a specific situation & punching Sandusky in the face is, in my opinion, the sane & rational response. Actually being in that situation is an entirely different story. McQueary didn't just walk in on some random person- he walked in on someone he *knew*-- someone he trusted & respected-- committing a truly heinous act. Think about someone you know & trust-- a close friend, a coworker or your boss. Then think of walking in on that person committing such a crime. Some people could keep their heads in that situation-- & I admit that fair number of my friends have been through enough fucked-up shit of their own that they probably could. But a lot of people couldn't, because they can not believe what their eyes are saying. McQueary couldn't. The Grand Jury's report makes it pretty clear that McQueary was a mess- roughly half a step shy of blithering idiot or, in gamer parlance, he failed his sanity check. (I did in fact read the Grand Jury's findings in its entirety-
http://cbschicago.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/sandusky-grand-jury-presentment.pdf It's a rough read.) As I've said before, you don't get rational thought from an irrational person. McQueary simply could not process what he saw. What most people don't realize about people like Sandusky is that they don't just betray the trust of the people they abuse; they betray the trust of *everyone* around them-- everyone who loves them, everyone who trusts them, every single person who believes the abuser to be a decent human being. We expect our monsters to be visibly marked & recognizable. We don't expect them to be our friends. McQueary discovered a monster & couldn't get his head around it so he went to the person he trusted most (his father), who sent him to Paterno to report what he'd seen.
Which brings me to the second question that keeps getting repeated-- "Why didn't they report it to the police?" There's a deceptively simple answer to that one-- because it was on campus. I've seen some suggest that local cops would say that the campus police would have jurisdiction & maybe that's true. But that's not the real reason. The real reason is that college campuses are their own little worlds in a lot of ways-- and particularly when it comes to crimes & especially when it comes to sexual assault. So the reason Paterno took it to his boss rather than the cops is because that's the actual procedure that colleges follow when that sort of thing happens. Seriously. The absolute *last* thing any university wants is to get the cops involved & admins will put a huge amount of pressure on victims to keep them from reporting crimes. I've seen it happen in cases of rape & other situations so I wasn't even remotely surprised that's what they did in this case (I was actually more surprised that people don't know that's typical procedure). It doesn't have nearly as much to do with having a famous coach & generally kick-butt football team as people think--it's because that how these things always go - and in this case, one of the admins Paterno reported to was the person who ran the campus security office, so he's the one it would have gone to anyway. An article my good friend Dawn linked to today has some excellent observations on how universities deal with sexual assault & harassment--
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2011/11/1401/ Best line- "The mistake Penn State made was, in many ways, a simple category error: they mistook these pubescent boys for women." Not that you ever see this level of outrage when it's a woman getting raped. (Obviously, I don't agree with the author entirely, but she makes some excellent points.)
Let me be perfectly clear here. I am emphatically NOT saying that I'm in any way OK with this. And I definitely do NOT think it is even remotely close to the right way to handle these situations. But while I don't agree with what they did, I understand why McQueary & Paterno reported it as they did, because it's such common practice. I feel some of the outrage is misplaced because I think it misses the real problem, which is that universities routinely doing this exact thing to their female students. (And I have a little bit of sympathy for McQueary because he's actually getting shit from both sides. While he's being vilified for not doing enough, he's getting death threats for even reporting what happened in the first place. How fucked up is that?) A spokesperson from PSU was quoted as saying that Paterno & McQueary followed the school's procedures for reporting but admitted that perhaps the university needed to revise those policies to better protect the victims (not to mention comply with actual state law).
My understanding stops there, however. I simply cannot understand why Curley, Schultz & Spanier proceeded to just chuck the whole thing out without any serious follow-up, if only because of the potential liability issues. I also find it a little confusing that Paterno's the one everyone's railing about when it was those three that did the actual cover-up. That's why the grand jury indicted them and did not indict Paterno or McQueary. Of course, the three stooges there are not nearly so famous, either. But that's one of the harder parts of this- they fired Paterno before they fired Spanier. It feels a bit like they tried to throw Paterno under the bus in hopes no one would notice it was really their fault.
All this said, there *is* one other factor that might possibly have kept some people quiet. The DA investigated Sandusky in 1998 but couldn't get enough evidence together to bring charges. But here's where it gets creepy- that DA disappeared in 2005. They found his car, they found his laptop in the Susquehanna minus its hard drive but they never found his body. Admittedly, some years had passed & I don't know what he was working on at the time so it could be unrelated. Or it could be that people kept quiet because they were concerned about more than just their jobs. But that's veering entirely too close to crazy conspiracy theory territory.
Mostly, what I feel is sadness. For those poor boys, for the families, for the students, for the fans. For people like my Dad who really thought JoePa was a hero. And for Paterno, too.