On the tragedy at Penn State

I want to be outraged over the scandal unfolding in State College, PA. What happened there, if the charges are true, was a tragedy of unthinkable proportions.

I want to feel betrayed by Joe Paterno. I want to be pissed at him and join the masses calling for his head, not just his job. I want to feel those things. But I can’t.

I’m utterly in denial.

I’m not among those who think the school made a mistake by firing their long-time head coach Wednesday night. I understand why it was done, and I believe it was right that it end that way, given everything we know. But my emotional blinders simply won’t let me believe Joe Paterno could have done the things people are saying. That at best he turned a blind eye to reports of improper behavior, and at worse enabled a child rapist by knowingly covering up a crime.

I just simply can’t fathom that those things could be true.

My connection to Penn State began when I was approximately 8 years old. My family had moved to Pennsylvania not that long before, and there came a day when our elementary school lifted its ban on hats and invited all the students to wear their favorite baseball cap to class.

I didn’t have a baseball cap, so my mom went out and bought me one. It was a Nittany Lions cap and it’s still hanging in my room at home.

I decided that if the Lions were going to get my implicit endorsement as a result of my wearing their logo around school, I’d better find out who they were. Some people are born fans of their favorite teams. As an Army brat who already had five states under her belt, I had to make a conscious choice about which programs to be a fan of.

So I asked my dad about PSU. And he told me of a man named Joe Paterno.

My dad had great respect for JoePa -- and Bobby Bowden, whom he always mentioned in same breath with Paterno as the two longest-serving and greatest coaches in the game. I learned that Penn State had been an independent before it became the eleventh school in the Big 10 (something I found ironic), and that Paterno had been head coach there since 1966. I learned about the Grand Experiment, and the national titles, and that Penn State football won the right way, and that JoePa did it with class. He was the old guard, my dad would tell me. He was really something special.

For years I watched the Nittany Lions and dreamed of the day when I’d go to Dear Old State. Indeed, it was the first college I ever visited when the time came for me to start looking at schools.

My parents ultimately persuaded me to visit the University of Florida a few months later. By the time I got to high school, we’d long since moved to Tampa, which made UF a much more attractive choice to them. I’d be able to go for free -- not something to be taken lightly, they repeatedly reminded me -- and I’d only be two hours from home. It’s a fine school, they said. The finest in the state. Plus, it’s similar to PSU in its size, offerings and outsize obsession with college football.

That ended up being enough for me. I fell in love during the campus tour and haven’t for a moment regretted my decision to be a Gator.

Yet Penn State and JoePa retained a place of honor in my heart.

The charges against the monster that is Jerry Sandusky are horrifying. I can’t even wrap my brain around the reality that there could actually be people like him in this world. I am grieving for the victims just like any feeling person would be. And if they turn out to be true, I hope the justice system chews him up and spits him into a prison for the rest of his life. Actually, there’s a quote from Pulp Fiction that starts with “What now? Let me tell you what now” that would be appropriate.

But I find myself wondering whether there might be another way to look at Paterno’s role in all of this.

If he knew what was happening and put the welfare of a football team ahead of the welfare of those children, that is deplorable in every imaginable sense of the word, and he deserves to be be arrested.

But are we sure he understood what was going on?

Is it possible that he heard rumors less specific than what we’re being told he knew about -- about a close friend and long-time colleague whose name was practically synonymous in that town with charity -- and it didn’t occur to him that it could be this bad?

Isn’t it possible that the idea that this guy who spent all those many years on his staff was a child molester just seemed so patently ludicrous to JoePa that it never even crossed his mind?

Isn’t it human nature to reject the notion that someone you trust could be guilty of something so heinously, inexplicably, unforgivably awful? To assume there must have been some sort of misunderstanding, because the reality flies so thoroughly in the face of everything you know about that person?

The analogy I’ve been reading a lot is that a grown man doesn’t walk past a stranger raping a girl in an alleyway without calling the police.

Of course I agree. But I also think it’s at least possible that this situation was different -- if and only if the full picture of what McQueary witnessed wasn’t made clear to Paterno.

I guess in the end, I just cannot believe JoePa, a guy I’ve adored and looked up to nearly my entire life, could have been aware of what was happening and not done anything to stop it.