Lucky, this point in time and space

These days, I rarely feel the need to comment on current events. But I've been following the sordid Penn State story with an increasing sense of anger and disgust that needs to find an outlet somewhere.

I keep trying to put myself in their shoes - Paterno, Curley, Schwarz. I desperately want to understand why they did essentially nothing, when presented with strong evidence - not just a rumor, but an eyewitness who reported seeing Sandusky having sex with a 10 year old in the shower - of an appalling thing happening that they had the power to stop.

I've tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a high-profile, money-making powerhouse with as much prestige as the Penn State football program. To know that if you report it as you are legally obligated to do, you will bring shame on everything you've worked for. I've tried to imagine what it would be like to learn that a trusted, close, and productive colleague has a horrifying darker side; to know that if you say something, you will be destroying his career, his family, his life. I have tried to imagine the reasoning, the decision process, the rationalizing, that these men must have undertaken. I do not imagine that it was easy; were it easy, they would have done nothing. The lip service they paid to the gravity of the crime - banning Sandusky from bringing children on campus - makes me think that deep down they did not want his monstrous tendencies to come anywhere near them again. When I really think about it, the pressures they were under, the difficulty of realizing a colleague is capable of something like that, I can almost understand why they did what they did. Why Paterno, having passed it along to the higher-ups, left it alone and absolved himself of responsibility, having perhaps done just enough to allow himself to sleep at night. Why the other men involved erred on the side of their own caution.

Almost.

Until I think about the simple fact that they had very strong evidence that this man was molesting children.

In my training for residence life, we always have an annual session about mandatory reporting of abuse. Mandatory. Mandatory. 

I think there are very very few cases of black-and-white decision making that a person is ever faced with in their life. But child molestation is definitely black-and-white. And I cannot, no matter how much I push my brain into Paterno's fictional shoes, conceive of a situation in which I, having learned of what was so clearly something horrible, would not have done anything.

I just can't.

It saddens me and enrages me more than any news story I've read of this year. Can you imagine being in a position to stop something like this from happening? Can you imagine not doing anything? How could you live with yourself? How could you fall asleep? How could you go to work with children every day and not think about it? Does winning football games and getting booster money really mean that much?

There is the right thing to do and there is the easy thing to do. How many times do we hear that message reinforced in movies, in media, in Harry frigging Potter? Do we not intuitively feel this, in situations like the Sandusky case?

I just don't understand how and why.