This will be a short post. Just a comment or two on the recent national scandal concerning college athletics. The Penn State incident, resulting in a firing, death threats, a riot, and another investigation has many people scampering about wondering “how could this happen?” and “what do we do now?”
Among the questions being asked, the most relevant is “Why did no one report this?” There were witnesses, at least one has stated sorrow at not having “done more” and a famous and otherwise well-loved coach has been dismissed as a result of inaction.
Yet the riot that occurred was not about the rapes of minors, but over the firing of that coach. As if that is the tragedy. As if a beloved head of an institution that has behaved abominably in this and many other instances matters more than the pain and suffering caused by an adult with authority and the trust of the young who couldn’t keep his hands off little boys. My question is, “what’s wrong with you people? Where are your priorities? So a coach lost his job? So what? He can get another job. Can those boys ever get their lives back as they were?”
I’ve commented on this before, often in sarcastic tones, but this is not to be taken lightly. We treat sports in this country as if it were a religion. In fact, to my view, sports is our national religion. We spend money we don’t have on it, build the biggest cathedrals to it, and worship it mindlessly as if our souls depended on the outcome of a given game. The only question was which denomination might sports be most like.
Well, now we know the answer. What other institution covers for child abusers? Just so the game can go on.
It would be useful to shift our view of the nature of the violation. Those who perpetrated the crime, directly or by their silence, did not deprive these boys of their lives or their childhoods. The injury is physical, emotional, and intellectual, but above all spiritual–the boys’ spirits have been damaged, but not beyond repair. The boys will not get their lives back the way they were. But they can heal. This horrifying story, once unbearably painful, can become for each of them a source of strength and compassion. I pray these boys will find that healing, even in a culture that so often denies the very existence of their spirits.
The crime these adults committed was their refusal to be truly human, to act on the essential inter-relatedness of all human beings, indeed all beings. We are a self-styled culture of individualists. Children are chattel belonging to their parents, except in the most egregious (and sometimes racially tinged) cases of abuse. Where other peoples’ children are concerned, we daily abdicate the responsibility to properly care for them—to feed, cloth, shelter, educate and love them. Why not turn take our pleasure where we find it? Why not turn a blind eye to the abuse of somebody else’s child?
And to this extent we are all complicit.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936) US novelist (1896 – 1940)
I fear that we have become a nation of people who function on the basis of cartoons–just look at our politicians, who have collapsed the world into over-simple ideas. Too many of us can’t deal with the real world’s complexity. I agree with you that sports is a form of religion for many Americans. Therefore, anything that threatens my teams success is inherently bad, and END OF ARGUMENT.
Mature thinkers regret that the team’s legendary coach will be let go, but that another cause is simultaneously served. Thus, I suspect that the rioters are simpletons.
Mark: Thought you might like this, from Scientific American: “Why Penn State Students Rioted—They Deify Joe Paterno” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=penn-state-students-rioted-defied-joe-paterno
“The more strongly we identify with a particular group, the more vehemently we defend its members and ideals—a trait that experts think evolved along with early human society. Banding together and protecting one another allowed our ancestors to survive, and so to this day we are quick to cheer on our comrades and feel animosity toward rival groups. Many scientists think this in-group psychology explains prejudice, racism and even sports fandom.
Most of the Penn State students who rioted Wednesday night have social identities that are built around a lifelong allegiance to the school. If you attend Penn State, Galinsky explains, “Penn State is you, it’s part of you, it’s such an important thing.†And nothing symbolizes Penn State more than Joe Paterno, head football coach for 46 years. Many of these distraught young adults chose to attend the university because of their love for the Paterno’s team—not the other way around. And they rioted because “the person that symbolized the school they go to, that’s given the school stature, that’s made their own selves have meaning and purpose, has now been taken away from them in an aggressive and sullied way,†Galinsky explains.”
I can acknowledge that, Erich—we see that kind of institutional loyalty across the board—but still excoriate it because it represents a failure to educate toward a set of priorities that must kick in during situations of extreme violations. Also, I think the nurturing of that kind of loyalty is a priori immoral. There may be no way to circumvent it—people are tribal in many ways—but this is something I simply do not grasp in my fellow humans, the handling over of all critical capacity to what boil down to icons. This baffles me. I didn’t understand it when it was exemplified by all those weeping, screaming kids caught up in Beatlemania any more than I understand the riots following losses of a loved team in any sporting event, nor in the inability of people to get past labels and Us and Them thinking. That these students would find it excusable to riot on behalf of Joe Paterno in the face of the allegations under which he was dismissed, without a single thought to those kids who’ve been damaged, says to me that these students lack something deeply important and are functionally handicapped. That our society fosters the kind of tribalism that not only allows this but praises it disturbs me deeply.