Quote:
Originally Posted by Izulde
He had a positive impact on a ton of people and the university in non-football related areas. All of that shouldn't be completely forgotten or dismissed because of this. I understand all the outrage and yes, this will forever taint his legacy, but there needs to be a balanced viewpoint.
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Well, he's just losing his job that he's been too long at anyway, he's not going into hiding, or being charged with anything (at least not yet), and he has a chance to redeem himself a bit if can say the right things and make the right apologies down the road.
I feel slightly bad for him, and "Big red" (as I call him). They're kind of in the third tier of Sandusky's victims. There's the real victims, the kids. Then the friends and family of Sandusky, and the players, who are all defined by this now, which sucks. And then the clueless, complicit "victims" like Paterno and Big Red. Yes, they did fail as humans, and they deserve this, but it all goes back to Sandusky. I'm sure there's plenty of old men and young naive graduate assistants that would have similarly botched this situation - they've just never had to actually deal with child rapists. Big red just wanted to put his sneakers in the locker. He stumbled onto child rape. Ya, his lack of reaction to that is wrong, but if not for the rape, he could have put his damn shoes away and gone on with his life. Hopefully Sandusky feels some guilt for destroying so many people's futures, the victims, and all the collateral damage, and does the decent thing and offs himself shortly.
Edit: We understand, at least somewhat, why child victims of sex abuse, and domestic violence and rape victims don't come forward. (though, like I touched on earlier in the thread, we just BARELY understand this stuff...certainly we're the first generation to really grapple with it). I do believe there's a similar type of mental situation going on in places like this, and previous organizations that have dealt with this. It's easy to scream and be angry, and those emotions are certainly justified, but it's probably more important to psychologically understand why people fail in these situations and what, organizationally, can be done to help mitigate or eliminate that risk that this stuff occurs. I don't think you can just believe that Joe Paterno is an evil monster and then just move on and assume nothing like this ever happens anywhere else. This is one of those psychological flaws that occurs with humans in organizations - I mean, we still don't really understand why seemingly otherwise normal German people could get a new fancy armband and do terrible things in the name of "following orders."