Heroes

Penn State is an odd organization. Run much like a government bureaucracy, its inner workings are so mundane and boring they only necessitate analysis when something bad happens (and something bad rarely happens).

Over the course of the past 48 hours, through news reports, radio interviews, a newspaper, and some grand jury testimony, I got to know Jerry Sanduski. See, I'm not a fan of college football, and while a student at Penn State is expected to live and breathe and eat football, I found college football's rules absurd and inconvenient, its playoff system incomprehensible, and I couldn't get over the simple fact that there are too many teams and too many players (as compared to the NFL, which makes complete sense). So I had no clue who Jerry Sanduski was until about Saturday morning. Turns out he's the former defensive coordinator for Penn State, and also the proprietor of a charity called "The Second Mile". Turns out he also molested up to twenty young boys between 1994 and 2009, escaping capture due to the legal failure of Penn State's Athletic Director Tim Curly and Vice President Gary Schultz and the moral failure of head coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier.

Let me explain Penn State a bit more. The response to these allegations has not been the angry retort of a pissed-off populace against a hated leadership. We like Joe Paterno. We like Graham Spanier. It's a little difficult to contort yourself into hatred against them, even though ignoring a possible sexual abuse claim is absolutely reprehensible. However, as thousands of Happy Valley residents and a few overturned vehicles can attest to, we need to learn that even our heroes can do wrong things and they need to be held accountable when they do.

There's been quite a bit of talk about the inherent "goodness" of Joe Paterno. Says one local editorialist, "All of these men that were involved, excluding Sandusky, are undoubtedly good men." Really? They may have ignored a reasonable and prescient claim of child rape in the interest of protecting a goddamn football team, but aside from that, I'm sure they are all great men who love their wives, Jesus, and America. In fact, one could say that through the annual Four Diamonds fundraiser THON, Penn State is one of the most philanthropic universities in the country. However, a person's morality is only relevant when acted on consistently. Sure, Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier had the potential to be good men in this situation, but they summarily failed.

Let me relate a story. At my high school, an English teacher was fired for carrying on a lustrious and illegal love affair with a male student. The teacher was well-liked by students, relatively popular amongst teachers, and a fairly well-known personality even for those who did not have her in class. While disgust for what she did was fairly widespread, it was difficult for both faculty and students to admonish her outright because of their allegiance to her as a mentor and as a friend. The relative badness of her actions did not match up with our belief that she was, inherently, a good person, creating a degree of cognitive dissonance.

This emotion, fellow Nittany Lions, is called "disappointment". Disappointment in a school which prides itself on the moral high ground. Disappointment in a leadership we trusted appearing to be the worst kind of self-interested organization not even the worst cynics could have predicted it to be. Disappointment in a wholesome folk hero making a large and consequential mistake at the expense of the well-being of 9 children and counting.

Let us not, however, lose sight of the actual villain. Joe Paterno is a nationally-renowned celebrity and the face of Penn State, so yes, he has unfairly become the face of this controversy. But, as allegations become far more undeniable for Sandusky, the selfish evil he unleashed on the childhood of these people, many of them grown adults now, over the course of 15 years is of the worst kind and no human with a conscience will blink if he never sees daylight again. That Sandusky is a bad person is inarguable and self-evident. But, as a famous quote (often misattributed to Edmund Burke but actually from a Russian film narration) goes, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."