It’s hard to know where to begin. It’s not as though we haven’t seen sex scandals before, especially among our politicians. From men claiming they merely have a wide stance in public restrooms to presidents who beggar the definition of sex, we seem to have seen it all. Herman Cain merely joins a long and ugly line of men who thought that power entitled them to anything and everything they wanted because their ultimate power apparently resided – in their minds at least – south of their border.
But then the news about Penn State’s legendary football program broke and suddenly there was a new standard for ugly. A standard so beyond anything we could have imagined just a few short days ago.
I’m not referring to the adult male who walked in on a ten year old boy being sodomized in a shower and walked out without taking action. That man will hopefully face a much worse judgment and penalty than society could possibly impose on him when he dies and tries to explain to his god how the glory of the Penn State football team was more important than the agony of that little boy.
I’m not even referring to Joe Paterno, a man who was legendary in the Italian community, along with Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca, as someone who somehow proved we were no longer immigrants looking in on the American dream from outside. His success proved that we’d made it, we were fully integrated into our society and would never again see signs hung on doors that said that Italians weren’t welcomed. Paterno too will face his god someday and explain how he could look the other way while young boys were tortured in his locker rooms and showers while he shrugged his shoulders and justified his conscience by saying that he’d reported it to his superiors and he wasn’t responsible for what happened after that.
None of those people horrify me as much as do the students at Penn State – the students who rioted in the streets and overturned trucks in their anger that the university had had the gall to fire Joe Paterno for something they apparently consider so trivial. In a world in which football is king, Joe is god and these acolytes apparently felt that those young boys were merely making the needed sacrifice to keep the football program going. Because if that isn’t what those students were thinking, then I beg them to tell me what was going through their minds as they rioted.
Athletics are big businesses in our colleges and universities. Student athletes are recruited with huge scholarships and other bonuses because they bring big money with them in many forms, from alumni donations to TV contracts. Being a brilliant scientist who will someday open the door to our understanding of the origins of cancer and its potential defeat as something that kills indiscriminately is clearly not as important in today’s collegiate world as being big enough to give someone a concussion under the bright glare of TV lights. If it were, it would be the high school science award winner being recruited by all the best schools in the nation. But it’s not.
As a woman, I know what it’s like to feel sexually and physically vulnerable to men who would use violence to satisfy their needs. As an adult, I would hope that if something ever happened to me, I’d be able to withstand the physical and emotional trauma and, with the help of friends and counseling, heal the wound. But even adults often find that a too daunting task after a sexual assault because the assault is so intimate and so horrific. So how, I wonder, do we ever expect these young boys to heal and have a normal life of any sort after this kind of personal, vicious assault?
Politicians, priests, athletic programs – all worlds dominated by men and all guilty of crimes in which one man dominates another through the most humiliating and devastating attack possible. And in each and every case, the institutions that surrounded those abusers tried to defend and protect them.
And now the students at Penn State give a rousing vote of affirmation and support to this horror. What the hell are we teaching our kids about what’s really important in life?