Darkness in Happy Valley

There are few certain things in this world - death, taxes, gravity, Rams losses. Tonight, there is one less certainty.

Joe Paterno has been fired as Penn State head football coach. On Saturday, for the first time in over 60 years, he will not roam the Nittany Lions sideline at Beaver Stadium.

Football coaches, by the nature of the profession, don't last long in one place. The job is just too hard. The head coach is a teacher, a tactician, a counselor, a business manager, a policeman, a CEO- all in one job held by one man. The demands of time, family, and body drive some from the profession; demands of on-field performance drive out many more.

For a man to last as a major conference Division I head football coach for the 18 years I have been alive is surprising. To last the 43 years of my parent's lives is remarkable. While clearly Paterno took less on far less responsibility than the average head man over the last decade or so of his career, he was still the boss, a testament to his legend, his lucidity, his ruthlessness, and in part, as we have learned, his negligence.

By now, the sickening details and horrific allegations of child abuse against former Penn State assistant Jerry Sandusky have been rehashed again and again. We won't discuss them anymore because, quite frankly, we don't need to know anymore.

What we do need to know, the question we do need to ask, is simple. How? How did nobody know a pedophile was walking in their midst? After multiple complaints, how could nobody put the pieces of the puzzle together? How could Mike McQueary do nothing after seeing a 55 year old man raping a 10 year old boy in the football locker room? How could four men in leadership positions (McQueary, Paterno, vice president Gary Schultz (who was in charge of the police department) and athletic director Tim Curley), four men in the business of educating young people, four men who claim to follow the motto "success with honor," successively fail not only to report the incident to police, but even to confront Sandusky himself about it?

"With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more."

The old cliché that hindsight is 20/20 has always struck me as totally unsatisfactory, no more so than in this case. It's a natural impulse to dwell on bygone events. But, as my wise mother always says, "you can't go back and unring a bell." The past is the past now. It is gruesome, it is awful, people deserve to pay for it, and it cannot be changed. It all leads to the biggest question these men must ask themselves everyday for a significant number of days. How can I look in the mirror each morning, knowing what I have (and have not) done, and go on with life as usual?

In 61 years at Penn State, Joe Paterno did so much right. In this situation, though, one can't skate by on some sort of lifetime achievement award. What happened years ago, and the (lack of) reaction to it, was unacceptable. We all face the same challenge with humanity- namely, that people are inconsistent and unpredictable. Good people do bad things. Worse, bad people can seem good.

Though Joe Paterno the football icon was an institution bigger than his institution, Joe Paterno remained a human being. He leaves in shame the gigantic hole he occupied for so long, a hole that threatens to swallow the identity of Penn State that he so carefully constructed over the course of his lifetime. What happened makes no sense, and never will. The whole situation is incredibly sad; the outcome for Paterno, deserved and unavoidable.

In State College, God is dead. It's the end of everything. Nobody escapes. Everybody loses.

The victimized young men most of all.