You have to keep an eye on the thing you’re refusing to look at

You have to keep an eye on the thing you’re refusing to look at September 20, 2016

Former Penn State college football coach Jerry Sandusky is incarcerated at a maximum security state prison in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where he is serving out a 30-to-60-year term for 45 counts of the sexual abuse of children. The evidence again Sandusky at trial, including testimony from multiple victims, was overwhelming. He was guilty. He is guilty.

This is an established fact. This is something that we know based on evidence. It is a repellant and unpleasant fact — something that we might understandably wish weren’t true. But that doesn’t change the evidence, the documented history, or the reality. Jerry Sandusky molested and abused dozens of children over more than a decade. He was arrested and convicted and imprisoned.

These facts are published, proven, and beyond any reasonable dispute.

And yet they remain disputed. Thousands gathered last weekend at Penn State University — the school where Sandusky was employed for all those years he was preying on children — and many of them flatly refused to accept these proven facts, refused to accept reality:

This weekend, former players and tens of thousands of fans paid homage to the late Joe Paterno on the 50th anniversary of his first game as head coach. Paterno happened to win 409 games over 46 years and gave his college town a national identity as a football powerhouse before we found out his real legacy: enabler of a convicted pedophile who raped boys over at least four decades. …

Joe Pa knew. He knew and he did nothing. He knew in 2001 and 1998 and, because of unsealed court documents, we learned this summer that he also knew as far back as 1976.

That’s from Mike Wise’s powerful essay, “Penn State Doesn’t Get to Decide Joe Pa’s Legacy: I Know.” And what he writes there is also beyond dispute. Joe Paterno knew what his assistant Sandusky was doing, and he looked the other way, allowing the abuse to continue, unchecked and unpunished, for years.

Paterno was forced to resign when the rest of the world learned what he knew all those years ago, but his long winning record as a football coach made him such a beloved figure that some Penn State football fans simply cannot accept their hero’s disgrace. They want to cling to their unqualified admiration for their beloved former coach, and so they choose to deny evidence, facts, and reality itself.

Here’s a photo of some of those fans at this weekend’s celebration honoring Paterno. It was posted to Twitter by Chris Abaray:

Sandusky

“Joe Pa was railroaded” the front of their T-shirts says. And then, on the back, “Sandusky is innocent.”

This is not a claim that these folks have access to some body of evidence that the courts and the public and Sandusky’s own attorneys were unaware of. They do not present — or require — any evidence for this claim just as they do not present or require any evidence for rejecting the established facts. This isn’t an argument based on logic or a conclusion based on evidence. It is, instead, an assertion of desire. This is what they want to be true, so this is what they say is true. This is what they choose to believe that “truth” means.

What would it take to persuade them otherwise? Nothing could do that. No facts, no argument, no logic or reason. Their claim is not based on any of those things, so it cannot be challenged based on any of those things. They are making a choice. And the only thing that can undo that choice is their choosing to stop making it.

The thing about such a choice is that it requires you never to see the reality you’re stubbornly rejecting. That’s tricky, because reality has a habit of sneaking up on you unless you’re very vigilant about avoiding it. You have to be watchful — to keep an eye on the thing you’re refusing to look at. And that’s just as hard as it sounds.

 

 


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