“[trigger warning - child abuse, rape] I feel no sympathy for Joe Paterno. I feel nothing for him at all. He died at 85 years old, and for the majority of his life he was at the top of the world- a hero, a saint, an icon. A rich and powerful man, in a position of power at a rich and powerful institution, that just so happened to allow countless children to be brutalized in order to maintain it's precious reputation and the money and power that went along with it. And he was complicit in that, no matter how much pretzel logic you use to try to excuse it away. At the very least, he was a moral coward, at worst he was a knowing enabler of the torture of children. Maybe he did have regrets, and maybe he was genuinely remorseful, but whatever personal hell he dealt with in his final months doesn't even come close to what the children who were victimized experienced, and they are still living with it every day. [...] But I'm one of the lucky ones. I am unlike the millions of kids who never escape from the cycle of psychological torture and self inflicted violence- the kids and adult survivors who kill themselves, either directly or indirectly. The ones who never make it out ok. And when they die, they don't get photo layouts, or tributes. They are faceless. They are nameless. They are forgotten. If you are going to grieve for anyone, grieve for them. Not Joe Paterno.”
—This excellent, excellent article here. Heavy trigger warnings for deep survivor shit. But so good.
Read this, JoePa fans. Read every word. Then read it again. Memorize it. Every time you’re tempted to jump to Joe Paterno’s defense against a survivor, remind yourself of this article. Form a pavlovian response so that you do this automatically.
Proceed to never, ever say a word about Joe Paterno again.
“The famed statue of Joe Paterno was taken down from outside the Penn State football stadium Sunday, eliminating a key piece of the iconography surrounding the once-sainted football coach accused of burying child sex abuse allegations against a retired assistant. Workers lifted the 7-foot-tall statue off its base and used a forklift to move it into Beaver Stadium as the 100 to 150 students watching chanted, "We are Penn State." The university announced earlier Sunday that it was taking down the monument in the wake of an investigative report that found the late coach and three other top Penn State administrators concealed sex abuse claims against retired assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. The statue, weighing more than 900 pounds, was built in 2001 in honor of Paterno's record-setting 324th Division 1 coaching victory and his "contributions to the university.”
—The Huffington Post, “Joe Paterno Statue at Penn State Taken Down.”
And there are still idiots who think dead-and-in-Hell child rape enabler Joe Paterno did no wrong.
Pro tip: if you’re chanting the school chant while your “hero’s” statue is being taken down, you’re deliberately ignoring what evil this man allowed during his tenure, which makes you an asshole.
This isn’t about supporting your school, fuckwads. It’s about erasing a giant, wretched stain from your own institution’s history. Get a fucking clue.
Penn State's punishment: What the NCAA took away from the school
- 5 years of probation handed down by NCAA to Penn State’s program
- 14 number of years of wins the school must vacate — basically every victory since Paterno was aware of the first allegation
- $60M the amount the school will be sanctioned by the NCAA; the funds will go towards programs to prevent child abuse
- four years of bowl bans for the school; they will lose 20 scholarships over four years, and students can transfer source
» No longer the winningest: As a result of the vacated seasons, Paterno will no longer be the NCAA’s winningest football coach, which means that Florida State’s Bobby Bowden is now the winningest coach in NCAA history — and a statistic that once meant everything means nothing.
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“On Thursday, the same day Louis Freeh, the former director of the F.B.I., issued his damning report about the cover-up of Jerry Sandusky’s sexual crimes by the Penn State hierarchy, the N.C.A.A. lowered the boom on — are you ready for this? — the California Institute of Technology. One of the world’s great engineering schools, Caltech is never going to be mistaken for Penn State as an athletic force. With fewer than 1,000 undergraduates, it is a Division III school, which means, among other things, that it doesn’t grant athletic scholarships. Its basketball team ekes out about five wins a season, and its baseball team, according to The Times, has lost 227 games in a row. At Caltech, unlike your typical athletic powerhouse, “student-athletes” truly are students. Part of being a student at Caltech means “shopping” for courses for the first three weeks of each trimester. Students are allowed to sample classes before they have to register for them. “During those three weeks,” read an N.C.A.A. press release issued on Thursday, “because they were not actually registered in some or all of the courses they are attending, some students were not enrolled on a full-time basis.” And part-time students, you see, are not allowed to play intercollegiate athletics. Between 2007 and 2010, according to the N.C.A.A., this happened with 30 athletes in 12 sports. It would be hard to imagine a more frivolous violation of the rules — or one that could do less harm to the integrity of college sports. What’s more, Caltech turned itself in after a new athletic director realized that the practice of shopping for classes probably violated N.C.A.A. rules. Yet the punishment imposed on the school was severe: three years of probation, a postseason ban in a dozen sports, the erasure of wins and individual records that were gained with ineligible athletes, and more. Indeed, Caltech was cited for “a lack of institutional control,” which is pretty much the worst thing you can be accused of in N.C.A.A.-speak.”
—JOE NOCERA, the New York Times, “Throw The Book at Penn State.”
If nothing happens to Penn State, let there be cries of outrage.
