McQueary and Mobs

There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.  --Herodotus

Students learn of the firing of former coach Joe Paterno and what is described on the news as a “small riot” breaks out.  I hear and wonder exactly what is a “small” riot?

 The footage showed what looked like a telephone booth (or was it a van?) overturned, a student atop a light pole and a group of students shouting and perhaps chanting.  It was nighttime.

The reported chants were “We want Joe back” and “One more game!”

And now it is reported that Assistant Coach Mike McQueary will not be on the field on Saturday for Penn State’s game, due to threats against McQueary, who was reportedly an eye-witness to one of the sodomy episodes at the center of the scandal at the school.

So here’s my question for the day, with a few givens:

1. GIVEN that Mike Mcqueary’s response of not intervening to save the child he saw being brutalized with his own eyes would not have been your response

2. GIVEN that you would have definitely intervened then and there

3. GIVEN that real people, children at that, were really hurt in real and lasting ways, at least some in a place (a college campus locker room) where they should have been safe and protected, but were not

Given all these things, and any other suppositions we care to make, how are the death threats against McQueary different than the behavior of the students rioting in the night with their foolish chant, One more game?

Aren’t both the reaction of the mob?

The punditry have given us the correct level of moral outrage, but did we really need that?  Do we really need anyone to tell us that this was wrong?  We know it was wrong, all of it.

But what we, the collective expression of opinion and will of the nation, do with this knowledge is the challenge.

We can, as we usually do and seem to be doing now, simply express our outrage, as if the mere expression of offense is taking action.

Or again, we can look to our own mirrors.  There are some hard and bitter truths to be found there:

1. Children in every neighborhood in every village, town and city in this country and around the world are exploited by adults while other adults look on and do nothing.

2. For every one of us who really would have stepped in in that locker room, there are probably ten who would have turned and walked away.  It happens every day.

3. Being disconnected from each other in any genuine sense of community (what philosophers call post-modernism [fn]) means that we have no sense of duty to the other, because we have no sense of the humanity of the other.  It is not surprising that we walk away.  It is sad, heartbreaking even, but not surprising.

If all we have to give the children who were exploited and abused is our outrage, it is little enough.  And they need so much more from us.  Perhaps a good starting place would be to stay off the streets and simply sit for a time with the enormity of it all.  For it is in the still small voice that Truth comes.

And Truth would remind us that all of us have walked away from somebody who needed us . . . all of us have let people down . . . and all of us can become better than we have been. . . better people, better family members, better citizens.

Threatening to kill Mike McQueary is no virtue.  It does not undo what was done.  And contrary to what we may tell ourselves, our outrage does not establish us as morally superior.

There is a place for outrage . . . it is and can be the impetus for change, individual and societal.

But remaining stuck in a perpetual state of outrage is unhealthy and ultimately is worse than doing nothing, because it gives us the illusion that we are acting for change when in fact we are doing nothing at all.

Moreover, our outrage, when given vent in the form of violence (and threats are themselves a form of violence) merely demonstrates than we are really no different at all.

If all we have to offer the children are our threats and our anger, we have failed.  We have failed them.  We have failed ourselves. And we have failed our God.

God’s call is to justice, not spleen venting.

And worst of all, perhaps, by giving vent, what we are actually doing is making this about us rather than about the true victims.

Where are the prayer vigils?

Where are the calls to friends who have suffered similarly asking if they’re all right?  For surely, any such news is a shock to those who have walked that horrible walk themselves.

Where are our tears?

And for outrage, where is our shock and dismay at the self-inflicted organization of our own destruction in the form of established power systems that cannot help but do what they did by virtue of their very nature?

More simply said, how dare we be surprised?

How dare we, who create demi-gods of our sports figures and give them immense power and wealth and acclaim and protection from lesser sins, be surprised that they took us at our word when it came to the greater ones that we did not want to know?

For let us remember, rules and laws were in place telling each one of those involved within the educational system what they were to do in such an event.  The problem is that they didn’t follow the rules.  But they seldom do.  And most days, we could care less.

Child sexual exploitation is not so much about sex as it is about power.  When we finally grasp that truth, it becomes clear how we are all complicit

And this isn’t touchy-feely do-gooder liberal gibberish.  This is hard truth.

When we set up systems with rules but then tell those within the system that they are exempt from the rules, we can’t be surprised that they believe us.

When we get angry with rule enforcers for consequences to the car-buying, money-lavishing behaviors in amateur sports; when we propose to ‘solve’ this problem not by stopping the practice but by legalizing it; when we value those of the institution or system not for their learning (the supposed purpose of colleges, after all) but for their money-making ability; when we wink and nod at grade fixing and criminal behavior by our sports ‘warriors’, we cannot, with any integrity, be surprised.

We have had our time of outrage.  It’s time to move on to the hard work, the hard work of being accountable to each other, the hard work of rethinking systems of power, the hard work of caring enough about each other to hold each other accountable before the horrors rather than after, the hard work of being citizens, people who live not alone but in community.

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Fn.  With the denial of an objective reality and an objective Truth, postmoderns have been denied a sense of self and have developed a fascination with power.  Postmodernism and You.  The loss of self and the concomitant increased focus on power makes the mob a likely outcome in a time of crisis.  That, of course, is not new (although it can be seen as evidence of a society devolving rather than evolving).  What might be new, is our tendency to give meaning to the trivial, as in rioting to give Joe Paterno one more coaching opportunity.  It would be hard to imagine anything less important given the disclosures of the day.