Don't Even Talk To Me About Sacrificial Lambs

I have been thinking a lot about this Joe Paterno thing. One would think that I don't really have a dog in this fight. Football? Whatever. I am genetically incapable of even listening to a football game.

But. I was sexually abused as a child. Not by a coach or a priest or a teacher or a stranger but by my stepfather.
And the damage that did to me has never, ever left me and never will despite years of therapy and all sorts of help and a damn good adult life.
There is no way to escape sexual abuse unscathed. Those who may say they have are, in my opinion, simply in deep denial which is going to cause problems along the way of its own.

I was thinking about this last night. About how there is almost always a cover-up if a perpetrator is discovered whether in a vast religion, a huge university football program or a home. How the victims of sexual abuse are as plainly the sacrificial lambs as one can imagine. They and their pain are sacrificed to the altar of the illusion of goodness (and sometimes godliness) of the institution. To my way of thinking, it is not Joe Paterno who is the sacrificial lamb in this latest situation, it is the victims of the man who RAPED THEM.

A blogger whom I respect a lot wrote what I think was the most powerful piece on this whole thing I've read. Suburban Lesbian Housewife said, "I see something like that? I'm getting a baseball bat or the heaviest object near me and I'm stopping it. Then, I'm going to the police. But I do not wait and go to my boss."
Click on the quote to go read her entire post.
Please.
She writes through the lens of being the mother of sons and a football lover. And I admire her for her fierce cutting-right-to-the-quick of the situation.

But I keep coming back to the view I have of the situation which is to wonder why there is always this damn silence about people (usually men, not always) who sexually abuse children.

When Freud first started out, he realized that almost all of his "hysterical" women had been sexually abused by their darling papas. He wrote a paper about it and presented it at a prestigious gathering. He was met with great resistance to the point where he retracted what he had said.
Had those venerable men who attacked Freud for his theory molested their own daughters?
One has to wonder and the great cover-up was begun. Well, not begun. It had obviously been going on since the beginning of human-time but it was given gravitas.

And so it has gone that people who have witnessed the molestation of children have turned their backs. Perhaps not even witnessed but surely knew in their bones that something, something evil was going on behind the closed door in the next room whether that room was the bedroom of a child or the cloak room behind an altar or the shower room of a college university program.

There are as many excuses and rationalizations for silence as their are victims. Fear of loss of income in a family, fear of the shame, fear of authority figures. Fear. Always fear.
And with the cover-up, with the silence, the crime becomes even more heinous because NO ONE PROTECTED THE CHILD and the child knows it. And feels the overwhelming burden of the knowledge that his or her silence is the price of a world not tipping over.

Where are the voices of the victims of this crime? We hear the voices of those protesting that Paterno shouldn't have been fired. We hear those loud and strong. And we're going to hear discussions on the legalities of reporting and we're going to hear all sorts of crap but the fact is, the man who sodomized those boys, Jerry Sandusky may have left THAT job but he remained in a position where his "charity" work gave him access to plenty more boys. For years.
And don't tell me that fact didn't register with Joe Paterno among what had to be many others.

Look- I don't give a shit how much good a person does in this world if he or she allows the crime of sexual abuse of children to continue when they could have stopped it. There is no balancing act here. Silence equals so much pain that death is often the result. I am speaking from the heart and the gut here.
I am speaking from a place where yes, give me a fucking baseball bat and a cell phone to call the cops.

Okay. I guess that's what I think. I guess that I disagree with those who say there is no black or white in this situation, only shades of gray.
I guess I think that because I have spent my entire life knowing exactly how gray life can be if one was sexually abused as a child. How even on the most beautiful day imaginable when the sun is so bright that it lights up the wings of the butterflies flitting from one flower to another not fifteen feet away, there can be such grayness that it is nearly impossible to accept that light as ones own precious, simple gift for simply being alive. How fear, once instilled in growing bones, can never be completely shaken off.

Because that's what happens to children when they are made the sacrificial lambs. They grow up to be adults who learned that lesson too fucking well to ever throw that burden off completely.
If they manage to grow up at all. That fighting to reclaim the belief that life is not meant to be suffered through can take more energy than seems worthwhile at times. Which affects everyone in that person's life for forever and ever and thus, the burden is made heavier and people who had nothing to do with the original situation must carry it too.

So yeah. The sins of the father. Etc.

And no matter what Joe Paterno did to make the football program at Penn State such a fine one, if he could have saved ONE child from being abused, he truly would have been a hero.

That's my opinion.

That's my dog in this fight. And believe me- I wish to every power that might be that I didn't have one. But I do. And I am not going to remain silent about it.