For those who thought I wouldn't find out about JoePa's death on a Penn State program, fear not, I knew pretty soon after it happened.
This is a journal I wrote about the whole ordeal a few days ago:
After hearing about the passing of
Joe Paterno, I was very confused as to how to feel. The past few months have
been nothing short of tumultuous, with new information and accusation coming
out what seemed like every day, with new feelings and emotions following soon
after. I’m not there in State College now (obviously) to see the reaction of
the Penn State community as well as the rest of the nation, and to be honest
I’m glad I’m not there. Too often in our society, the voices of the extremes
are heard over the less vocal members of the more rational middle ground.
Without even being there, I’m sure people across State College are saying how
JoePa’s the greatest person to ever live, or how he’s aided in pedophilia or
whatever blah blah blah. And I’m sure that’s just a microcosm of the rest of
the country and the national media (wouldn’t be true if didn’t sneak that in,
right?). In my opinion, we need a Rally to Restore Sanity for JoePa. People
need to start focusing on the facts, and stop with the over-glorification and
the accusations.
Even way back when I got accepted to
Penn State, I was afraid that he’d die while I was there, a feeling that I’m
sure was shared by many other students. About a year and a half later, I had a
not-so-fleeting feeling that he would die when I was in South Africa, and
unfortunately I was right. While here, though, I learned more about the
situation from some others on the trip. For instance, I knew that he had been
told he was fired via telephone, but I had no idea someone drove to his house
and told him to call some phone number to hear it. If that’s not sketchy I
don’t know what is. It’s such an annoyingly difficult internal struggle to
fight with when I hear about just straight-up dumb stuff our Board of Trustees
do. On one hand, I selfishly hope that this can't
be the only school in the country that’s run by a pack of baboons, and that my
school isn’t the only one operated in a shadier fashion than the Masons. But on
the other, I don’t really want the higher education system in our country to be
filled with dimwits like Penn State apparently is/was.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I went
downtown that November night he got fired. Aside from a handful of idiots that
made the rest of us look bad, I thought it was a good way to show the Board
that the students (the ones funding their lifestyle) aren’t exactly thrilled
with the way they’re handling things. I remember remembering (almost memory
inception) part of a Family Guy episode where they show President Bush hiding
in his tree house avoiding dealing with the Hurricane Katrina cleanup, and
thinking about how sadly relevant that was to our situation. People are just
fooling themselves if they think that we all went out there that night for the
victims, let’s be real: it was for JoePa. The candlelight vigil, which had a
higher attendance but less media coverage, was for the victims.
In all, it’s sad to think that even
I couldn’t resist talking about the scandal in this journal when there were so
many more potential positives in his life to talk about. While I’m not exactly
about to put him at capital-h status, someone of his stature deserves better.
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