Devil's Deposition: Joe Paterno Delayed Reporting Sex Abuse to Avoid Ruining Anyone’s Weekend
The entire football program should be completely dismantled at Penn State.
Torn completely down. And the ground salted.
And, then, maybe in three or four decades, there can be talk about starting a football program at Penn State.
2 comments:
No, Penn State's entire football program should not be shut down. And not just because it wasn't the Penn State football program that facilitated the rape of several young boys. The assumption that Joe Paterno is so inextricably emblematic of Penn State football that his fortunes should be Penn State football's is the same assumption that drives Paterno's fanatical supporters to personally and publicly bully Jerry Sandusky's victims.
Calling for the football program to be shut down validates the kind of nonsensical deification Paterno already experiences. What's more, it shifts the blame from where it belongs: individuals. These rapes were the fault of the perpetrator and the people, Paterno included, who covered up for him. By focusing the blame squarely on those who are directly responsible for these crimes, we're exposing them as who they are: individual people with agency who failed act morally. The real problem here is not the existence of an organization. It's our inability to separate organizations from their human actors. The solution is not to shut down the organization where this occurred but to single out its most morally corrupt members for justice, as a reminder that belonging to a cult of personality doesn't exempt you from your duty to other human beings.
I want to see everyone involved tried, and properly blamed. Nonetheless, I agree with Shayera. Football is the company business in a company town, and what we're seeing is a systemic lack of interest in protecting the health and safety of children. We're not talking about a few bad actors here, the entire chain of command was corrupt and corrupted the process of justice. Any system that is promoting crime must be dismantled. Hell, I'd go after them with RICO, too.
Salt the earth, and take every penny that Penn has earned from football in the past 15 years, divide it between the victims and RAINN.
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