Friday, July 13, 2012

Penn State Saga -- continued

As the Penn State thing unfolds...

One of the questions that comes to my mind and... OK. I'm thinking out loud here and this won't be as organized as it should be. It'll also be too long I'm sure.

1) Do we care about the victims or 
2) Are we more interested in nailing people to the wall?

Those two things don't work well together in the court of public opinion.

If you're part of an organization that has this sort of stuff happen in it and you tell it's going to splatter. The public outcry for shutting down everything and turning off the lights has nothing to do with the victims. It has to do with nailing people to the wall. If all we're after is punishing people who break the law we're screwed.
The guy that did it should be tried and sentenced (I can't ever spell that word right, don't know now if I have, is there an "A" in it?) if he's guilty.
People who knew about it. Those individuals... if they broke the law they too should be tried for that.

But to blanket shutter the windows & doors on an entire institution is the sort of knee-jerk witch hunt reactionary behavior that makes it so hard for people to come forward.
Insane response on the public's part makes sane behavior on the part of people who know things hard to expect realistically.

We need to seriously stop shooting everybody within forty-seven miles of a sexual assault and pay attention to making sure the victims are taken care of and that the perpetrators of the crimes are the only ones punished. Setting Penn State on fire and burning it to the ground does nothing to stop such a thing from happening again.

It helps create the culture of secrecy because God knows, nobody wants to be associated with it and if you talk you're associated, period.

This was originally from a Google+ post I made on 7/13/2012 but I wanted to be able to find it again.

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