The shrieking harpies have said this is all because of football. It has nothing to do with football.
It has everything to do with institutions being insular, operating in secrecy, and individuals being more concerned about the well-being of institutions than the well-being of children. It's about people with poor judgment being unchallenged in their authority.
It's about people sitting back and rationalizing evil and making excuses for doing nothing while bad things happen to kids.
If you insist football is the problem, then I would point you in the direction of the sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church and the "kids-for-cash" scandal in Luzerne County. They had nothing to do with football and they shared many of the same attributes I listed above as the Penn State scandal.
What the Freeh report really does is illustrate how those four men rationalized doing nothing about Sandusky. In the emails and notes you get a sense of dread, that they feared there was potentially something horrific going on, and that they were concerned what would happen if the situation exploded in their faces.
And yet time and again, they found a way to convince themselves that the best thing to do was nothing. As the report notes, there was talk of referring Sandusky to the authorities in 2001, but ultimately they satisfied themselves that going to the leadership of Sandusky's charity, The Second Mile, was the right thing to do.
Sadly, as we've seen time and again in Pennsylvania, evil was met by a small, pathetic act by those in power.
We are a country that was founded by a bunch of radicals who thumbed their noses at the most powerful empire in the world. Yet now we routinely shrink from calling out large institutions.
We once held the powerful as accountable as the common man. Now we treat the powerful with kid gloves at every turn.
We once knew how to call out evil. Now we stick our heads in the sand and hope it will pass us by.
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