We Are Paterno

It’s not often the Penn State Board of Trustees asks my advice, in fact the next time will be the first.  But had they sought my counsel regarding the Joe Paterno statue, I’d have offered guidance they might not have received elsewhere.  Leave the statue where it is.  Then create a bronze statue for each of the victims who came forward, head down facing away from JoePa and his charging players, and several glass statues – ghosts, if you will - representing Sandusky’s anonymous, uncounted victims. Believe me, they’re out there.

Here’s the problem with taking down the statue: it eradicates the glaring reminder of what happened.  “Let’s put this behind us and look to the future,” is not the most beneficial action here.  If the Penn State situation were an aberration, it might be a good move, but it isn’t.  The uniqueness is the setting and the setting only.  I can guarantee you that any therapist or social worker who works with families that include sexual predators, knew the truth within the first forty-five seconds of Sandusky’s interview with Bob Costas.  Mr. Defensive Coordinator Extraordinaire is a garden variety sexual predator.  The only thing that makes him different is his fancy playground.

The NCAA came through Penn State with a fiery sword the other day and left a rather wide swath.  They may not have issued “the death penalty,” but I’d almost rather be dead than get shot in both knees, one shoulder and the nuts.  Much of the sport and news talk afterward focused on how the football program would survive for now, and how long it would take it to come back.  I’m far more interested in how long it will take the mental health and social work programs of this country to rise to championship status in the first place.

Championship status!  Hell, I’d be happy with a winning season.

The economy goes bad and politicians start making cuts.  On the right, social services and mental health treatment are among the very first targets, and the left is all too willing to leave them on the table as bargaining chips.  What are they bargaining away?

They’re bargaining away hundreds of thousands of kids just like the victims of Jerry Sandusky.

A teacher in a public high school in this country is looking out over a classroom that includes (conservatively) one in four girls and one in seven boys who have been sexually mistreated.  In my early days at the mental health center in Spokane, Washington, the child therapist who worked almost exclusively with sexually abused five-and-unders, worked twelve hours a day four days a week and ten hours the fifth, eating lunch in the minutes between clients, and she had a six month waiting list.  That’s in a county that might have included 350,000 people. 

The two categories of people most often diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in this country are soldiers and sex abuse victims, and from a mental health perspective we treat them both about the same.  They go to war - and believe me, if you’re a victim of that kind of abuse, you’ve been to war – and expect them to deal with the damage with almost no help.  The New York Times reports we’re losing a soldier a day to suicide.  There’s no way to calculate the number we’re losing from that other war.

The reason Joe Paterno and the rest of the top guns at Penn State were able to respond to what they knew in such a shameful way is, they didn’t engage their imaginations.  They didn’t allow themselves to picture those kids, didn’t empathize with them. Because of that, the kids were dismissed and ignored, and Penn State is going to have a crappy football team for a long time. 

But now we are Joe Paterno, and we have a second chance.  We have been reminded once again that it’s time to engage our imaginations, see the kids we are charging past, pick them up and bring them along.  We know they’re everywhere among us, and once we know it we can’t unknow it.  No one gets more naïve.  Just as the “leadership” at Penn State couldn’t protect the Nittany Lion brand by pretending the awful isn’t real, neither can we protect the USA brand that way.

Penn State was fined sixty million dollars by the NCAA, to be distributed to organizations around the country equipped to prevent and treat sexual abuse.  Sixty million.  Given the size of the problem nation-wide that’s like taking a leak in the Pacific Ocean to warm it up. 

If you want to be the greatest country in the world, you can’t just declare it so.  You have to make it so.  You can’t simply harken back to a time when your national political and economic forces aimed to create actual equal opportunity.  You can’t rename greed, capitalism and then rename that democracy.  In the same way putting a magnetic ribbon on your car doesn’t really mean you support the troops, calling Jerry Sandusky a monster may not mean you really want to take care of lost children.  Taking care of lost children calls for funding and action.

Sandusky’s victims – at least some of them – are found now.  They discovered varying degrees of empowerment speaking up, and they’re going to be offered help.  But close your eyes and use your imagination.  The horror those kids went through is all around you.  They are calling for help in language you may not understand, but there are people out here who know that language, and if we create public policy that supports them, trains them, and pays true middle class wages while keeping client loads at reasonable numbers, we can begin snatching those kids out of Sandusky’s shower and walking them to safety. 

Boy Scout "Leadership" Loses Moral Compass

Big surprise that the “leadership” of The Boy Scouts of America spent all that time and energy to arrive at the same conclusion about gays among their ranks as always: that approximately ten percent of the population will continue to be excluded based on the same kind of willful ignorance that kept women and blacks from voting for more of our history than not.  And it baffles me that any adult, gay or straight, would direct their kids toward an organization that, ten or twenty years from now, will likely be viewed, at least as far as their leadership goes, as a hate organization for their bigoted views on a population that is as natural, and numerous, as left-handers. 

If the fear (and understand that you will never hear them articulate their true fear) is that accepting homosexuals as scout masters increases instances of molestation, then they should issue an equally loud outcry toward male coaches of girls’ athletic teams and males who lead church youth groups that include girls.  I know of far more instances of inappropriate and illegal behavior by leaders of those groups. The national BSA “leadership” doesn’t seem to consider that their policy puts scouts more at risk of sexual victimization, because it focuses on a population statistically less likely to offend than the general population, and away from true predators, such as, say, the great football defensive coordinator at Penn State who nobody ever accused of being gay.  Predators are genius at choosing their playgrounds, and sleight of hand is their thing.

If the fear is that gay boy scouts or gay scout leaders will influence straight boy scouts to become gay, well, that’s just dumb.  Stupid.  Ignorant.  All the politically incorrect terms that point to a brain that simply doesn’t operate well and feels no compulsion to gather any real information or make change.

It’s time we started calling things by their real names.  The National Board of the BSA is replete with bigots.  They benefit from being part of a culture (and I blame the conservative/religious right for this because they are masters at calling something its exact opposite) that has somehow made it more heinous to call someone a bigot than to be a bigot.

The big wigs of the BSA will do what they do.  Their “leadership” is filled with hard-wired dogmatists, and their asses are covered by the Supreme Court.  About the only thing Decent America can do is never contribute and don’t join.  The Scouts’ true value is to give us something visible to stand against.  

But Decent America must also require their media to tell the truth when dealing with issues such as this.  The whole truth.  USA Today reported that a “special committee comprised of professional scout executives and adult volunteers, was unanimous in its conclusion…”  While the article names the Scouts’ chief executive – Bob Mazzuca – and two members of the executive board – James Turley and Randall Stephenson, who have “recently indicated they would try to work from within to change the policy,” -  none of the other members of that “special committee” were named.  They are allowed to promote their bigoted policy under a cloud of anonymity.  Tough investigative journalists have exposed the identities of CEO’s and underlings responsible for the recent Wall Street crash.  They ferret out undersecretaries of undersecretaries whose emails have contributed to all manner of governmental excesses.  Hell, a National Enquirer reporter brought down John Edwards.  Certainly there is an investigative reporter out there somewhere willing to track down the names and photos of this “special” subspecies so that twenty years from now we can look back on them with the same contempt that civil rights champions look back on the likes of George Wallace and Orville Faubus. 

I worked as a child and family therapist full time for almost twenty years, still chair my county’s original child protection team.  Before that I was an educator of students k-12 in alternative education.  I have worked with gay teenagers trying to find their way in all venues, many simply staying alive long enough to find respite among intelligent and compassionate humans, accepting enough to let them have control of their own lives in a hateful greater American climate; worked with gay foster parents, gay teachers, gay artists, coaches, business people.  When I hear willfully uninformed people from the so-called right talk about the “gay lifestyle,” I automatically think, Get up, grab breakfast, go to work, try to live a meaningful life…JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!  There is no gay lifestyle, people.  There is only a forced secretive existence in response to “Christian” conservative bigotry.  Lifestyle has nothing to do with sexual orientation.  Should I be asked to “come out” as a heterosexual?  “Hi.  I’m Chris Crutcher.  I do what is none of your damn business with women.” 

Famed weight-loss expert and failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee revealed his true colors following the Boy Scouts statement, declaring that keeping gays out of scouting will protect boys from abuse.   Huckabee consistently doubles down on his political views by couching them in his religion, and in the process contributes to the shameful name of both.  There is no correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia.  None.  Mike Huckabee willingly allows his philosophy to trump his humanity. 

Morality is about decency, plain and simple.  It’s not about religion and it’s not about sex.  It isn’t an abstract; it’s about action.  I’m not a Christian but I grew up in a Christian church and am hard-wired with many of its teachings, and the Jesus of my imagination would slap Mike Huckabee down like a moneychanger.  Decent America must deny extremists - Huckabee and all his Huckabettes - their basic premises, because if you accept a stupid basic premise, you enter into a stupid conversation.

Based on my conversations with teenagers, and I have had many, I’m guessing that Scouts themselves are far more accepting of their gay peers than is their “leadership.”  A majority of young people with whom I’m in contact don’t get what the gay marriage or gays in the military controversies are even about.  As one high schooler told me only a few weeks ago, “Who gives a shit?”

Well, Scouts, here’s my advice to all of you who want to be on the right side of history, as well as the right side of humanity.  Get new “leadership.”  Better yet, get leadership.  If it comes from the ranks, they can’t deny you.

PHOTO:  What a pussy scout I was [second from the right, age 13].  That was a bunch of scouts from McCall and me headed for the National Jamboree in Colorado Springs in 1960.