I just saw a story on CNN that left me nearly speechless with outrage.
The report came from outside the Penn State football stadium, live, during the run up to today's season-ending game.
The reporter told us that this gave has taken on special importance, because after everything that has happened with the child sexual abuse scandal, it would be more than these students could bear if they lost the football game, too.
Say what!?!
OK, I'm not a football fan. Maybe I don't understand the intensity that people put into following the sport.
But I sure as hell don't understand how you make a connection between years of children being raped because nobody had the courage to stop the rapist and winning a football game.
It's OK, I suppose (though I don't share the sentiment) to be sad that Coach Paterno's career ended on this note. But allow me to point out that his career wouldn't have ended on this note if he had had the courage to buck the system and not participate in the cover up.
We will never know exactly how many children could have been saved from rape if anyone in the Penn State athletic system had made the simple value judgment: The safety of children is more important than the reputation of this football program.
The breadth of this scandal is a testament to the cowardice of every individual who knew of the charges against Sandusky and didn't act to stop him. That starts with the graduate student who witnessed the rape of a child and did nothing more than tell his superior about it. Every single person who said "I reported it to my superior, so it's not my problem anymore," is responsible for how long Sandusky was able to operate without sanction.
So please, CNN, lets not pretend that the Penn State football team can scrub its honor clean by winning a football game this afternoon.
The players were not responsible for what happened. They weren't even in college (or high school) when the great moral failure of their coaches began.
What's happening this afternoon is just a football game. Last one of the season. It has nothing at all to do with the cowardice and moral bankruptcy of the program's leaders.
To pretend it does trivializes what happened to the child victims.
Maybe I don't understand because I'm not a football fan. But it seems to me, if those student players want to claim their honor -- whether or not they had anything to do with the crime -- the real statement would be to refuse to play today. They could refuse to be operatives of a corrupt organization and refuse to help enrich the athletic program that covered up the rape of children.
It isn't going to make a whit of difference to the victims if Penn State wins or loses today. The game has nothing to do with the crime. The student players were not among the enablers. They bear none of the blame. But at the same time, the outcome of this game is so unimportant in the real scheme of things that to link it this way is nothing short of disgusting.
Penn State cannot recover its honor by winning a football game.
But maybe, just maybe, the institutional culture that would link the performance on the field of a football team with the moral bankruptcy of its coaches and administrators is some small part of why the coaching staff could live with the idea of sweeping a heinous crime under the rug for the good of the program.
It's just a game, and all the games in the world aren't as important as the safety of a single child.
That is all.