Today, we've received calls and e-mails from neighbors, friends, and family. Everyone has the same question for us -- "What do you think about Penn State?"
That's a very hard question to answer. I could say it's made me feel disgusted. I could say that it's made me feel angry (don't even get me started on the completely clueless, unprepared, and seemingly gutless Board of Trustees). Or, I could tell them that it's reduced more than one member of the family to tears. Penn State is a special place. I know that sounds hokey, but it's true. To see it vilified -- and to understand that the actions and inactions of members of the Penn State family are the causes of that vilification -- is extremely saddening.
All day, I thought about what I would write this evening. When I got home, Kim told me that her dad recommended that I read today's editorial from The Wall Street Journal. I'm glad that he did. Amongst all the hyberbole that the media has been spewing, it was refreshing to see a rational, reasoned, insightful piece that stays away from emotion while commenting on some of what's so very wrong with our society. Since it sums up my feelings perfectly, I've lifted it entirely and reprinted it here.
The end of Joe Paterno's run as head football coach at Penn State University was all but inevitable the minute Pennsylvania's Attorney General released the horrifying details of alleged sex abuse by a former assistant coach. Yet the iconic coach's dismissal after 46 otherwise spotless years is more an occasion for sadness than righteous satisfaction.
"This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more," Mr. Paternoo said in a statement Wednesday announcing that he'd step down at the end of the season, at age 84. The university trustees fired him instead Wednesday night, effective immediately.
Mr. Paterno's statement refers to his decision to inform a university official, and not the police, that a graduate assistant had told him in 2002 about witnessing former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with a young boy in the showers. It isn't clear from conflicting reports whether that graduate assistant told Mr. Paterno the ugly details of the sexual assualt that is described in the grand jury report.
But, this is at best ameliorating, not exculpatory. As everyone has noted and Mr. Paterno himself now seems to accept, the coach fulfilled his legal obligation, but not his moral duty, to look after the well-being of that child and others who may have been victimized later. He is now paying for that lapse in judgment with a tarnished end to a long and distinguished career.
This is not to endorse all the media moralizing, which revels in schadenfreude that another man of great reputation has been revealed to be flawed. We live in a culture that worships celebrity but seems not to want heroes, or even figures of respect. The icons of our age are the Kardashians.
Mr. Paterno has done enormous good across six decades at Penn State, especially for young people, and that legacy should not be forgotten amid the denunciations. Given the relentlessness of modern public scrutiny, and the thousands of young men who have traveled through the Penn State football program, it's something of a miracle that Mr. Paterno could coach for 46 years without a previous notable blemish. We doubt it will happen again. It's also something of a relief that, in a culture as libertine as ours, at least some behavior -- sexual exploitation of children -- is still considered deviant.
The events at Penn State are indeed a tragedy, and doubly so because they give new license to cynics who want Americans to believe that no one who achieves prominence in public life can be honorable.
This is where the magic happens.
