One parent of a victim at the end of the Sandusky trial and guilty verdict said "no one wins here." To me that was the most poignant truth. Everyone loses -- the many who were the victims, Penn State, The Second Mile a place for troubled youth, and those who made the egregious error of not reporting the crime. The dastardly offense was committed against the innocent who had the glory of youth stolen, and also committed against those around Sandusky whose crime was that they were there, observed the unobservable, did not want to see and did not know what to do. The crime had tentacles reaching far and wide like a cancer spreading to all things near it even to us removed by distance but who had our senses assaulted merely listening to the evening news.
Why does man perpetrate on his fellow man so many egregious and intolerable things violent in extremis in deed AND word; unacceptable to humane men? The never-ending 24/7 media talk about it will make our ears bleed from the assault on our senses. But we must talk about it.
The brilliant MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes's book "Twilight of the Elites" illuminates that our institutions we heretofore trusted have failed us. We have been betrayed. From the church, to institutions of higher learning, to Wall Street, to our courts and to Congress we have been abandoned. Sandusky is a metaphor for all of it. If we do not care about one another as a species we are, indeed, like Sandusky, doomed by our own hand.
