{"id":13410,"date":"2012-07-16T14:19:57","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T18:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jetnation.com\/?p=13410"},"modified":"2012-07-16T14:20:23","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T18:20:23","slug":"our-symbolic-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/2012\/07\/16\/our-symbolic-obsession\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Symbolic Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can\u2019t recall exactly when I started rooting for Penn State.\u00a0 I was very young and it was too long ago.\u00a0 Yet while I can\u2019t remember when it started, I clearly remember why.\u00a0 My dad and I were watching a game together.\u00a0 It was the first game I can recall watching with him.\u00a0 Penn State was being soundly beaten, but he was still rooting for the team with the boring uniforms and nameless jerseys.\u00a0 Being young and wanting to feel good about the game, I asked him why he doesn\u2019t root for the other team.\u00a0 They were clearly better and winning handily.\u00a0 In the minds of children, this is all that is needed to find a rooting interest.\u00a0 He told me that he roots for the losing team because of their coach.\u00a0 He said he was a good man and he was making sure his players went to class and graduated college.\u00a0 He said he was donating a lot of the money he made back to the school, so that the students could have nice things and improve their campus.\u00a0 I was too young to appreciate any of those things at the time.\u00a0 I just wanted to root for a winner.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t like the feeling I got from watching <em>my<\/em> team get beat, and I was not finding any consolation in the accomplishments of the football program away from the football field.\u00a0 I asked my dad what the team\u2019s name was.\u00a0 He said they were Penn State.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Penn State has been my favorite team since that day, and it became much easier to root for them over time as the victories have by far outpaced the losses.\u00a0 As I sit down now to watch college sports, I can\u2019t help but factor my dad\u2019s reasoning into my rooting interests.\u00a0 Ever since that first game, I always pull for the school that takes the <em>student<\/em> part of term \u2018student-athlete\u2019 more seriously.\u00a0\u00a0 I scan recent memory for instances of recruiting violations and arrest reports.\u00a0 I think about coaches who jump ship for better positions leaving recruits behind to think about broken promises.\u00a0 Basically, I always look at the two schools taking the field and try to determine, who is doing a better job at making men out of these boys.\u00a0 It\u2019s idealistic for sure, but it\u2019s what I do.\u00a0 I want to see people who do things the right way have success.<\/p>\n<p>I am glad that my dad isn\u2019t around to see what\u2019s happened at Penn State.\u00a0 I am glad he will not have the opportunity to read the Freeh report or to listen to the news and hear about the colossal failure of a man he admired. \u00a0\u00a0Yet, I realize that\u2019s part of my symbolic obsession.\u00a0 Like I did all those years ago, I\u2019d love to hide myself from the reality of what went on at Penn State.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to turn on the television on a Saturday in the fall and watch football and never think about the Freeh report, or of children being harmed, or of the imperfection of admired men.\u00a0 Like I wanted to do all those years ago, I want to watch the game and have it make me feel good.\u00a0 I want to see the symbols and ignore the realities.\u00a0 I want to, but I can\u2019t.\u00a0 I think about what my dad might have said to me if he were here.\u00a0 I think he would tell me to learn something from this.\u00a0 I think he would say to somehow become better because of it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think he would look for a way to escape it.\u00a0 He would deal with it, as painful as it would be to see his favorite coach exposed and redefined for a miserable failure of character.<\/p>\n<p>It is probably because of the lesson that my dad taught me so long ago that I am wondering why it is that the discussion following the release of the Freeh report is so dominated by the debate about a statue of Joe Paterno on the Penn State campus.\u00a0 I am wondering about this symbol and the focus it is receiving above the multitude and gravity of realities that still await the same attention.\u00a0 I am wondering why our immediate focus always seems to be on the symbols around us and the feelings we wish them to evoke in us.\u00a0 I am curious if the removal of the statue would help those who support its demise to forget the tragic events that went on under Coach Paterno.\u00a0\u00a0 I am wondering exactly how deep our symbolic obsession goes.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve put myself in Joe Paterno\u2019s shoes as much as I can possibly conceive of them.\u00a0 I have tried to imagine a graduate student walking into my office at the tail end of my storied career to deliver news of a crime that I can\u2019t possibly fathom.\u00a0 I try to imagine what I would do.\u00a0 I think I would be shocked and at first I would try to protect myself through denial.\u00a0 I would press the young man on the details and his level of certainty in the hope that there was some way, any possible way that he could have been mistaken about what he saw.\u00a0 I think I would be shaken to my soul that someone I hired, trusted, and considered a friend could be capable of such a crime.\u00a0 I would think about the victim.\u00a0 I would think of all these things and then my thoughts would inevitably turn to myself.\u00a0 I would be tested by the selfishness that exists in all of us.\u00a0 I would think of the countless hours spent in building an iconic program and the many men who were made better by spending their time in it.\u00a0 I would think on the years of charitable work and millions given in support of the place that I love.\u00a0 I would be afraid.\u00a0 I would be afraid that a life well lived and an unblemished career could be erased by letting this atrocity come to light.\u00a0 Then I would need to make a decision.\u00a0 This is where my imagination fails.\u00a0 I am no man\u2019s judge, and I can\u2019t say that I would have done any better in that moment than Joe Paterno did.\u00a0 What I can say is that our general proclivity to avoid the realities of distasteful situations is reason to keep the statue where it stands.\u00a0 Our symbolic obsession is what inspired it.\u00a0 We had no question about its existence when the feelings we derived from it were positive.\u00a0 If our symbolic obsession is as deep as these discussions seem to indicate, than I support keeping the statue.\u00a0 Let it help us not to hide from the realities of this situation.\u00a0 Let it stand despite the fact that it might make us feel bad.\u00a0 Let it stand to help us to learn something from this.\u00a0 I would sooner support the demolition of the football stadium than the statue.\u00a0\u00a0 It would be better if the statue pointed to pulverized rock and twisted metal.\u00a0 It would be better if it were the symbol of a great man trying to teach us the unpleasant reality of how easy it is to raze a legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can\u2019t recall exactly when I started rooting for Penn State.\u00a0 I was very young and it was too long ago.\u00a0 Yet while I can\u2019t remember when it started, I clearly remember why.\u00a0 My dad and I were watching a game together.\u00a0 It was the first game I can recall watching with him.\u00a0 Penn State [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-featured-editorials"},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peLffi-3ui","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13410"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13413,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13410\/revisions\/13413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miletestsite.com\/jets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}