When you are accused of heinous acts of child molestation, or if you look the other way, or don’t do everything in your power to stop it, you aren’t annoying – you’re inhuman. You literally fail as a human being. You may perhaps not have that intangible life force called a soul. In order to have the ability (and it is an ability albeit a vile one) to have such little regard for another human life, you must also possess the mental fortitude to somehow live with yourself day in and day out. It’s simply unbelievable.
And somehow people like Jerry Sandusky, and to a lesser extent people like Joe Paterno, found a way to get up in the morning and go on with their lives. Lives, mind you, that were looked upon as inspirational. Sandusky, who adopted six children, took in countless others, and was perceived as a mentor to young boys, is charged with over 40 counts of sexual assault on eight boys over fifteen years (as of Nov 23rd). I believe the number to be much higher than eight. I believe that his adopted children suffered some forms of abuse. I believe his wife is either in an advanced state of blind denial (or is just as purely evil as he is).
Then there is Paterno, who looked the other way and in his words, should’ve done more in hindsight. I love when people say that “in hindsight” they made the wrong choice, because it means one thing: Now that I’ve been caught, I won’t even go so far as to take full responsibility for my actions (or in-actions). He’s had years, decades to have hindsight. Instead he chose to do what even good men so often do, and that is nothing.
I realize the 10 Most Annoying People of 2011 list is a light, puff-piece, snippet of writing that often invents ways to find fault with perfectly agreeable people (No hard feelings, Krochet Kids?), however, I do believe there is one group of people in this whole tragedy that can (when I’m going very easy on them) best be described as “annoying”.
The students. The supporters. The people that heard about this story and chose to latch on to the real issue, the true injustice: the firing of Joe Paterno. It wasn’t the forced sodomy, sexual assault, and disgusting abuse of power that angered these kids, it was the firing of their coach and unofficial mascot, 85 year old Joe Pa.
If there was an award for Completely Missing the Point it would go to these kids. Even Ashton Kutcher, blindly Tweeting that it was an injustice to fire Joe Paterno, retracted this statement when someone sat him down and suggested he read beyond the title of online articles. But these kids knew better. They knew why he was fired. Yet they arrived, en masse, to his house to support him and join him in a chant of “We are Penn State!”
I suppose these kids figured since even 9/11 only shut down football for a week, it was no big deal, and they were the unfortunate “victims” in all this. I remember watching the video of the kids outside Paterno’s house. The video of Joe outside talking to the kids. It was all about him. It was all about them.
I know that everyone knows someone that has suffered from sexual abuse, if they haven’t suffered from it themselves. It changes you. It breaks you in a way that quite often can’t be fixed. It robs you of your innocence and of your trust and faith in human decency. It makes you feel inside the same way you suspect (or wish) the perpetrator feels inside – if they have the capacity.
But of course that takes a backseat to self-centered college kids, self-important coaches, and football.
Johnny Malloy hates the fact that it seems like our nation, our world, is slowly losing it’s soul, so every once in a while I like to make a “no pressure” plea to my dozens of readers (there are dozens of you – DOZENS!) to let a little humanity creep in once in a while. For all my sarcastic blogs, I live my flawed life day to day with one goal in mind – to not hurt anyone. And if that’s not a gooey sentimental end to a blog posted the day before Christmas, I don’t know what is.
From all of us here at Mr Cecil’s Blogatorium, which is me, Johnny Malloy, and my online handle Mr. Cecil, “Happy Holidays!” (or) “Merry Christmas” (or) “Merry Nice-Long-Weekend!”
