The Joe Paterno statue, issues it kindles

We in Morris have our own special sense of what excessive sports zeal can do. We had our goalpost incident in which a young man from the Pacific Northwest got killed. It happened when UMM was retiring its old football facility.

Now we have Big Cat Stadium which is like a monument to our love of football. A flat grassy piece of land isn't good enough anymore.
Our sports zeal resulted in pain at the micro level (a small Midwestern college). So micro, the major media outlets weren't able to obtain any images of the incident in the days following, not even a still. We seemed like Mayberry.

Out in Happy Valley, or State College or whatever the place is called, we're talking macro. A huge deal is being made of whether the bronze statue of Joe Paterno should come down, Saddam Hussein-style.

The late coach, who finally found escape from this tempest through death, is in a pose with a finger elevated as if checking the wind direction. From a block away it might look like he's flipping the bird.

What I suspect he's doing is proclaiming "number one" which is the ideal that is synonymous with America. We believe in a laissez faire economy in which there are winners (a small percentage really) and losers (about whom it was written "The majority of people lead lives of quiet desperation").

Should the statue come down? I might ask why such a monument is called for in the first place. The larger issue here might be college campus iconography.

There are many great coaches who would never be considered for something like this because they don't stay in one place. They aren't lesser coaches for having moved around. You could argue it's healthy for professional people to move around. Doesn't it promote accountability?

People who stay in one place can build sort of a fortress around themselves, covering up problems because of their intense familiarity with their surroundings. I have always heard bank employees are required to take vacation time. That's because once they're gone a while, we might unearth any "funny stuff" they've been doing.

Let's see, Paterno was the Penn State University head football coach since the Pleistocene Epoch, or something like that. Weren't some (rational) people already making an issue of him staying so long, even without knowledge of the, uh, "embarrassment" that later came out?

Barack Obama in his usual sage way commented that "systems are more important than individuals." He cited this as a prime lesson to take away from the Sandusky/Paterno mess.

Jerry Sandusky never admitted wrongdoing or shortcomings or whatever you want to call it.

Is Paterno to be vilified? Given his choices, he did the wrong thing. But we can ask "were the choices too extreme?" He could cover up the mess or expose Sandusky to condemnation of the kind reserved for the very worst human beings, perhaps even to a violent death at the hands of prison inmates.

Oh, but he deserves it? We might say we wouldn't shed any tears over Sandusky's suffering and fate. But what if we should more properly view people like him as sick? I have written before that this man may have been born with a sexual compulsion over which he couldn't exercise judgment.

We don't like to discuss it, but aren't people born with all sorts of sexual compulsions? Bernard Goldberg once wrote about how "people are notorious for lying about their sexual behavior." He was writing about trying to get information from people about how they might have come down with AIDS.

Most of us cringe at the mere topic. We debate about whether gay people are "born" that way. But really the whole matter seems shrouded in mystery. It was really cruel for God to create us this way.

The media tell us in regard to those missing girls in Iowa that there's a huge number of sex offenders in what seems a fairly small area there. How many are there in West Central Minnesota? My goodness, how do all these people get in such serious trouble? How can they continue leading anything like a normal life? But they do, I guess.

What if Paterno had faced a "third option?" What if he could have revealed Sandusky as a man with a problem, someone who needed confinement and segregation to ensure he couldn't victimize anyone else, but who could still be treated as a human being, getting the kind of compassion we extend to people who simply have problems?

Paterno and his fellow PSU bigshots might well have been amenable to this. Instead they faced the polar extreme of choices. They choked in the face of that, choosing the no-go option of cover-up.

They saw a lot of good that Sandusky was apparently capable of doing, and they couldn't stomach simply turning him over to be crushed by society, to be rendered a non-person really.

Yes, it was a mistake. But perhaps we need to refine our vision a little, being less inclined to throw people deemed undesirable into prison as if this really accomplishes anything.

There is precedent with the mental health field. Whereas we once warehoused many mentally challenged people in a place like that Fergus Falls facility - kids in Morris used to tease each other by saying "they're going to send you to Fergus" - today these sufferers have become separated out based on diagnosis and treated appropriately. They're in group homes.

People are increasingly questioning prison. It's bad news for Appleton which rolled the dice by building a big prison. But it might be good news for society. Absolutely condemning someone is becoming a last resort.

Sandusky is being punished for doing something that 99 per cent of us wouldn't consider doing. So maybe he has a problem.

Sex is a realm of mystery and anguish that too few of us wish to confront. We point fingers at misbehavior while perhaps concealing our own philandering. It's a laboratory of lies.

In Sandusky's case, serious intervention is needed because he has innocent victims. But Paterno and those other Penn State heavy-hitters had extreme choices: cover up the problem and hope it goes away, or throw Sandusky to the wolves and watch him be devoured.

And now we're left debating a statue. The statue isn't a big deal. It should just be a formality to have it come down.

All Paterno did was build an entertainment machine using the model of gladiators. It's a sport suddenly controversial because of the severe physical punishment imposed on its practitioners. We might see football fade quickly as a result of countless families making private family decisions not to have their sons exposed to such drastic health risks.

The Paterno empire and its gladiators will fade into the history books.

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com