What Would You Do?

When the allegations against a former football coach broke over the weekend in State College, PA I was horrified on the part of the victims and wondered how this could have happened. As I read more of the story, that horror was joined by a great disappointment in the actions of these ‘shapers of men.’

Ideally, each of will act in the best interests of those below us, be it in stature or station in life. Again, I said ideally and I understand where idealism falls, which is just above naiveté in the grand scheme of things. We cover this altruism through a series of cut outs in our daily lives; giving to charity, tithing at church, donating to the food bank, etc. How we would react, and the actions we would take, when presented with the real world chance to rescue someone or remove them from peril, is something that most of us will deal with as an intellectual exercise only. Thankfully.

What must have gone through that graduate assistant's mind as he saw an older man violating a young boy in the showers at Penn State? We will never know, but we can postulate what OUR reaction would have been. I will never be able to grasp why that young man did nothing to stop what he saw happening. I will never be able to grasp why he did not call the police. I will never be able to grasp why his father did not tell him to call the police, and instead offered the counsel of reporting this act to the head football coach. I will never be able to grasp why the head football coach felt his only obligation was to report it up his chain of command. I will never be able to grasp why the athletics director never saw fit to contact the police. I will never be able to grasp why the president of the university never thought to ask the hard questions as to why the school was banning this retired coach from bringing children on to campus. A punishment that the athletics director had said was all but unenforceable. There are so many factors that I will never be able to grasp but there is one basic one I will never be able to understand. That is why did none of these men stop for a moment and act like decent human beings and bring this action to a swift and final halt.

All it would have taken is for one of these men, men that are counted on to shape the lives of young people as a course of their chosen vocation, to pick up the phone and press three buttons. 9-1-1. Instead, they all chose to act in a manner that protected their own narrow self-interest. The GA gets to keep his job and not drag the name of a coaching icon into the mud. The coaching icon gets to protect his protégé and handle these actions outside the bright lights of the public eye. The AD gets to avoid a scandal that would tear his iconic football team apart, and feels that he is protecting the institution. The university president gets to cloak himself is plausible deniability and say he never knew the true nature of what had happened. At each step of the way, each individual who could have taken action to protect that little boy chose instead to take action that protected themselves. The may acted correctly within the structure of the law, but they abjectly failed every moral test the situation allowed for. 

It is our moral obligation as human beings to protect the defenseless. In this instance, an instance now stretching back more than twelve years, the institution of Penn State and the people employed there failed this moral test abysmally. 

One question that kept coming up in my mind was this. If you had witnessed what this GA allegedly witnessed, how would you continue working for the man and institution that acted so feebly in reaction to it? I cannot imagine the moral conflicts that must be at play to rationalize that.

One final thought, as the consuming public we will b able to put this out of mind and sleep easy at some point in the future. For the men who failed so miserably in this story, they will have to try to sleep at night knowing that failed the basic test of human decency. It is something that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.