Shed No Tears For Your King. The PSU Scandal

Let's face it.  I am not going to be able to get to my Vegas trip without at least venting a little about the Penn State scandal.  I can't ignore it.  It can't be unseen.  So, here's my thoughts, for what it's worth.

I'm appalled.  Simply and utterly appalled.  And, unfortunately, a lot of my post will be about the one person who stands out more than everyone involved, Joe Paterno.  He shouldn't.  The case is against Sandusky.  Sandusky is the monster.  Everyone else simply enabled him to do what he did.  And lionizing Parterno or vilifying him does nothing to help ease the victims' pain and suffering.  They are truly lost in all of this media circus.

I did not go to PSU.  I was a Pitt grad.  Now, before you flame me for making this a Pitt vs. PSU thing, understand this.  I hold no loyalty to Pitt athletics.  I hold no loyalty to college athletics at all.  In fact, I am disgusted by the entire entity known as the NCAA.  They are a corporation who makes money off of collegiate athletics.  Pure and simple.  Regardless of whether they uphold standards of morals or values about sportsmanship or whatever, above all, they are in business to make money.  If not, they wouldn't be licensing all of their gear with the logos and player likenesses to EA sports or other profitable venues. 

That being said, what happened last year at OSU... and chew on this, I will never refer to OSU as THE Ohio State University.  Once again, it's not a Pitt thing, it's just simple pretentiousness.  I don't care if it says "THE" in the logo, the charter, whatever document you want to march out.  It's Ohio State University or OSU.  End of THE story.  Anyway, that whole debacle last year over player compensation, lying, whatever, just proves that the NCAA is just as corrupt as any other corporation that is greedy.   They mete out punishments when it's clear that everyone knows there is something wrong but clearly they hold the business in a higher regard than the well being of the student athletes because if they didn't, these scandals wouldn't take place and there would be stiffer punishment and reform for the programs.  Better regulation.  Better watchdogs.  They know it's there, but as long as it doesn't disrupt the business of making money or tarnish the brand, they turn a blind eye.

Back to PSU.  I don't need to rehash the story.  I don't want to.  We all know what happened and if you don't, go read the presentment to the grand jury.  You can find it here as well as everywhere else.  Quite simply, this was an incident that was swept under the rug when it could have been exposed before any others were hurt.

Mike McQueary walked into a shower and saw an act.  He then reported it to Joe Paterno.  Sometime later, he was then called into the offices of Curley and Schultz and explained what he saw.  Police were never involved.  The incident was dropped and Sandusky was merely relieved of his locker room keys and the incident was reported to Second Mile, the charity or 'farm team' for Sandusky's prospects in his monstrous acts.

Now, whether McQueary is lying in what he told Curley and Paterno or whether Curley and Paterno were lying about what they were told is irrelevant.  The fact that some kind of indecent and inappropriate acts were taking place between an educator/administrator/adult and a child on University property requires, at the bare minimum to be reported to REAL police, not campus cops.  REAL POLICE.  911 POLICE.

Not to mention that as a witness to the events, McQueary should have been compelled to stop the act when he witnessed it.  There was a recognition between the perpetrator, victim and witness.  After all of this went away, there were times when McQueary and Sandusky were present at the same place and same time, and with children involved.  How do you hold your tongue, let alone your lunch?

Now, onto Paterno.  He is not guilty of breaking any laws?  I posed that as a question because I do not know for sure.  He broke 'God's' law, if you want to call it that.  He took his stance on integrity and morality that he spewed so much in his 41 years as coach and threw it on the ground, stomped it, pissed all over it, then spat on it.   He failed a child and so many more.   To say that he reported it to his superiors is convenient when it suited him.  Any other time, Paterno has been the perceived boss.   When his boss, Curley, went to his house to tell him it was time to go, as head coach, Paterno showed him the door.  Who would fire Joe Paterno?  Apparently, when it comes to disciplining Joe, he has no boss.  When it comes to reporting a heinous crime against a child, he has superiors. 

And the culpability goes on up to Spanier and even the University because they levelled a ban on Sandusky from campus facilities that was considered, unenforceable.  Well, why did you want to ban him?  Because he didn't turn off the lights?  Because he burped in public?  No, because he did something wrong.  He did something worthy of being banned from campus.  Yet, you let him back on campus and around children.  Why?  Because you didn't involve the police.  Why didn't you involve the police?  It would tarnish the program.  It would tarnish the reputation of the brand.  It would tarnish your King, who was friends of 30 plus years with the predator.  What other reason would you have to not involve police?

Athletics and University appearance should not be held above the safety of children.  If so, then what kind of message are you sending your prospective, current, and alum students?  We want you to grow and learn and feel safe in our environment but if anything happens, don't tarnish the school, regardless of how bad you get hurt.

And to not fire Paterno who has systematically proven that he holds too much power would have been another slap in the face of those victims.  Joe should have resigned immediately and not said, "Oh, I'll retire after the season."   Do the right thing.  You are the face of the school and the program.  No one other person holds as much influence.  You are the King.  You screwed up.  Own the fire.

"But he did his job."  Did he?  If you see someone's house on fire you call the fire department, right?  Do you ignore the sounds of someone in distress?  The difference is that McQueary and company weren't in a fire situation that could have caused them physical harm and more work for the fire department.  A little boy was being assaulted.  A little boy saw your eyes look right at him and you turned and left.  Everyone pushed it up the chain of command yet not one person thought to take care of the victim.  They left it up to the system and this child is forever lost.

Paterno IS culpable.  His fame, his legacy and his contributions over the years do not outweigh the obligation to protect the innocence of a child in his house.   And if you think that he did all he could have done ask yourself one thing, what if McQueary told Joe that there was a kid in the showers with Sandusky and his last name was Paterno.  Do you think Joe would have been fine with just telling his 'boss'?  Do you think he would have personally gone down there?   Do you think he'd be OK with McQueary just saying, "Joe, it was your son I saw, so I left and told my Dad and he said I should tell you." 

Make that kid's last name any of the people involved: 
McQueary.  Would he have left them in the shower?
Curely.  Would he have been fine with finding out a whole two days later and simply barring Sandusky from campus?
Spanier. 
Paterno.
Schultz.
The last name of any student/alum who cheers for Joe, on his lawn, or thinks that Joe did enough and now is flipping cars and vandalizing news vans at State College in outrage over Paterno's firing.

Put any of those names on the victim and ask how they would have reacted.  It would tell a different story.  Any child that is being harmed or abused or assaulted or victimized becomes your child.  In the world of education and development, you are a parent in the sense that you are obligated to do everything in the best interests of a child whether he/she is yours or not.

So, do not shed tears for your King, because he shed none for you when you needed him.  He simply did the bare minimum.  We Are Ashamed.

Waxing Scholastic

Welcome back, kids. Welcome back to the world of cliques, and tests, and general apathy for anything coming from a text book.

I never really minded going back to school as a kid. I mean, it did suck that the summer was over and as I got older, the summer seemed to go by quicker and quicker. But I never felt the dread some kids felt going back to school in the Fall. Maybe it was the time of year. After all, high school football was starting up and I had been actively attending the games, in a service role, since I was nine or ten. My dad was/is a member of the Lions Club International, in my hometown, and they were responsible for concessions at the games. On Friday nights, I’d be at the game, pouring pop drinks, making cotton candy and popcorn. When half time rolled around it was usually a cue for us kids to get out of the way, due to the extremely busy flow of customers and our smaller stature being more of a hindrance than a help. At this time, I’d go watch the half time shows.

In high school, I was a drummer in the marching band and attended every game in uniform. During these years, school started two weeks early, for me, as we had to go to band camp every day. Now, you can make any joke you want, but the drummers were the rebels and usually got into more trouble than most kids. In fact, I can remember one poor chaperone, who is the father of one of my oldest and dearest friends, being a good sport in the wake of our antics having been saddled with us misfits. So, for that, I have to give a shout out to Big Daddy D in Memphis. At least he had no knowledge of the Black Velvet Cooler on the bus.

Unfortunately, after high school, I only attended one game and really didn’t pay much attention. I was home on Fall break and more interested in seeing my girlfriend at the time after being away for three months. I lost track of things after that. I grew up and was spending more and more time at college.


But then college ended, too. That’s when you get the real wake up call. For any kid who bitches and moans about having to get up for that first day of school, just remember, in a few years you’re going to have to get up every day for work. There is no three months vacation and if you’re lucky, you will still get off on the weekends. Savor these days.

In fact, I miss those days. Last week, I had to drive down to Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh and took a route through my old stomping grounds at the University of Pittsburgh. Long story, short, my Mother in Law had her first round of chemo treatment and didn’t react very well. She got admitted over the weekend and this particular Friday night, my wife parked her car in valet parking which closed before she was ready to leave, prompting me to come rescue her. We managed to get the car out of the garage but she had to follow me home by a different route since we were afraid the Parkway East was closed for construction.

Driving through campus brought me back 10 years into my mind, but the landscape had drastically changed. Gone was The Pit, a small black box theater just down the street from the Litchfield Towers and The O. Gone was the parking lot between Hillman and Carnegie Libraries, replaced with Schenley Plaza, a small five acre park that has a carousel operating between April and October. Still there are the memories of descending onto campus in late August and into the bowels of the parking garage beneath the dorms with thousands of other residents. Each one of us, fighting tooth and nail for a big yellow cart, had to haul our belongings up to the tiny antiquated dorm rooms overlooking the streets of Oakland. At night, we lie in our rooms, listening to the cars zipping along Forbes and Fifth Avenue. Above us, the sky thumped with the sounds of Life Flight heading to one of the many hospitals on campus.

While most of my friends moved off campus, I stayed for all four and a half semesters that I attended Pitt. There was something about living on campus that felt right. Being close to everything was part of my plan. My dorm was my bedroom and the rest of campus was the rest of the house. Rent would have been ridiculous, especially for the dilapidated, run down, slums of Oakland that were passed off as acceptable housing to us students. Not to mention having to pay and lose security deposits every year as well as having more stuff to move in and out. I could make it through the entire school year off of what would fit in the bed of my Dad’s truck.

Oh, to be a student again, without the responsibilities of adulthood would be great. I could stand going to class again, instead of work. I could tolerate being up until two in the morning if I didn’t have to be up four hours later. I could stomach eating campus food from the café if I didn’t have to worry about what I ate as I have neither the metabolism nor digestive system anymore to handle O Fries and beer on a Friday night.

However, I know one thing that has changed, since I graduated, that would doom me if I were in my 20s, again. When I was in college, we didn’t have Facebook and MySpace and Twitter like we do now. We had just begun to get Internet access in the dorms when I first enrolled and even then it was a phone line that prevented you from getting calls to your room. If you forgot to put your phone on voice mail, you ran the risk of getting booted off the phone line. Back then, I had to pay seven cents for every call to the computer lab. Ethernet access wasn’t available for another year or two. Still, the greatest thing we had to distract us from studying was a few chat rooms online.

But now, I could see myself shirking homework to make sure I helped my friends on Mafia Wars or waited for crops to be ready for harvesting. I would spend countless hours chatting with friends and wouldn’t care that I had a huge paper due in Philosophy. With the Internet the juggernaut that it is today, I would surely be doomed to fail or at least squeak by with a 2.0 GPA as I would rather have been on YouTube watching cats play piano and God knows what would have happened if I would have had a WoW account?

All of the coolest gadgets and technology that came about in the last five years are dedicated to the demographic who can take advantage of it, the high school and college student. Of course, I would have really abused it by using Twitter and Facebook to coordinate cheating on tests and with cell phone cameras, I could have probably made a small fortune by attending and filming classes with the intent of putting them online for students who had better things to do. I would have even gone to classes I wasn’t signed up for in order to maximize my earnings.

Ten years ago, had I known what I do now, I could have easily made money on eBay through various questionable means and my shirt shop on CaféPress would have been a good investment in order to make some side money. Fifty bucks a month today is nothing, now, but to a 20 year old, I would have been the collegiate equivalent of Bill Gates. As it was, I never had a full time job until after I graduated. I only worked during the summers which had to last me the other nine months of the year.

So, welcome back students. Hit the books, live it up and remember a good education isn’t always found in the classroom. That’s why I’m here. Call me Mongo the Tank.

P.S. You can get any of the designs you see here at Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! the store.

Intuitive Counter

I am in for so much trouble, I can just tell. I think my wife and I have given our 18 month old daughter way too much freedom. We used to have physical boundaries in the form of plastic storage bins for decorations that kept her from wandering around to the various drawers and cabinets that contain all the fun stuff like knives and pans. It saves me from admitting that we need cabinet door locks and outlet covers. She’s getting to be the right height to open doors. Every week another danger rears its ugly head. I can’t rely on what worked yesterday as a rule of thumb. Usually, unless she knows something opens or has moving parts, she just assumes that it’s part of the background. It’s not until she notices you open something then she realizes she can open it as well.

Since the holidays came around we have taken down the barriers and the child roams free when we watch her. It would have been hard to explain to guests why we had these huge plastic totes barricading our daughter into the living room as if it was the wall between Mexico and the United States. At one point, before Christmas, as we were putting them away, I swore I saw a tiny David Hasselhoff singing on top of the remaining tote. He then picked up tiny fake cheeseburger toy off the floor and proceeded to it eat. But, now she goes into the kitchen begins to open drawers and doors and sees shiny objects inside. We had tried to be very discreet about not letting her see us do that. Somehow, she evolved, adapted, and overcome. Now, we’ve had to up our game. We’ve had to really become parents. We just went from defense to offense.

You see, as a parent I’ve had to learn a lot of things. Two very important traits are discipline and consistency. In other words, you have to be consistent in your disciplining of the child. Actually, I’m being facetious, in a way. In high school I took Sociology and found it to be the hardest yet most rewarding class. We did a whole segment on child development which nearly caused me to fail the class. Each student was given a different developmental period to master for a project and then a cumulative test touched on all stages of childhood development. I couldn’t make heads or tails on any of it. I didn’t understand that a lot happens in those first few years. While it may seem brief, the psychological development of a child surpasses the physical development of a human being over its entire life. There is so much to learn in that short amount of time. The only physical attributes that get honed are balance and dexterity. That’s just practice.

Now, I will say that, regardless of how little I know about child development, this kid is smart. Too smart for her own good. All the books in the world will never nail down a specific time frame for when a child should perform a certain action but I know we are either on target or ahead of schedule. So, it came as no surprise when the little one began to question authority. I think that developed while still in the womb. So, when I say that you need discipline. I mean that you have to be willing to make the child upset when it’s time for bed or bath time. You have to be ready to be the bad guy at a moment’s notice. You cannot make idle threats and not back them up or you’ve given the child carte blanche to ignore your authority. I credit my wife for having a well honed bullshit detector. She gets a lot of practice on me alone. Children are especially good at sniffing out BS like a prized pig can sniff out the best truffles. With my kid, she gets the added benefit of my wife’s DNA. If you tell the child you will send them to bed for acting up, you better have them packing if they do it again.

With consistency, that’s more of a team effort. If my wife forbids an action, I have to forbid it, too. Otherwise, the kid will pit your sympathy against their authority. For example, we give my daughter these little cereal puffs that come in a container. My wife doesn’t allow her to carry around the whole container because she tends to spill them all onto the floor. I like to get out a handful and put them in a little dish for the child to work from as an exercise in fine manipulation. The child sees this as a process improvement in efficiency. Sure, these little fingers can grasp one puff at a time, but if I lick my hand and stick it into the container, I can retrieve several. Less work yields more results. Now, when I refuse to let her do this, she gets completely irate and goes into operation shutdown. She flails about, whines, and does her best performance.

What really amazes me about this miniature human is that she is a very quick study. She knows exactly how to push buttons and when she’s being bad, she turns on the cutesy voice and says, “HI!” Somewhere along the line she said it for the first time and we thought it was adorable. Now, she uses it like it makes us forget she’s being bad. Remember, this child is not even two years old yet. That’s my contribution to the gene pool, I guess. I was very agile, not physically, but mentally.

So, here we are at my In-Laws and my daughter starts heading to the steps. Until this past November, she’s never shown any interest in them. However, now she is quite an accomplished climber and can ascend very well. Coming down is more like repelling and relying on gravity to do most of the work. This particular day was her first attempt and we had been trying to give the kid a chance to correct herself when she’s in the wrong by counting to three. Again, I have no idea when a child understands that counting is bad when coming from a parent and why they stop at three when schools expect you to go beyond your allotted digits before advancing to a higher grade. But, we figured we’d give it a try. If anything else, this kid will have fractions between two and three down pat. It never fails though, we get to three and she just stands there continuing the bad behavior. As she neared the steps, she knew she was in the wrong because she looked at us as she got closer. Two attempts to call her over had failed, so my wife went to the counting. No sooner than she muttered the sustained call of one that lasted more than three seconds, my daughter called back, “Twwwwoooo.”

Everything came to a screeching halt. We both looked at each other in amazement. Our daughter just helped count to two. I didn’t know whether to be extremely proud or smack her for begin insolent. Once again, I don’t know at what age that kids develop a sense of sarcasm. In either case, both my wife and I showed off how disciplined we really were. Neither one of us cracked a smile. Oh, but we laughed later when our daughter wasn’t around. We laughed hard.