This morning, as I was picking out an outfit for Drew to wear, I paused before his Penn State t-shirt. Any other day, I would have put it on him with pride, hoping someone might stop us at some point in the day to ask about our connection to Penn State, to tell us their cousin or brother or niece went there. We could talk about what a great, magical place it is. I’d reminisce about how much I missed it, half-joke about how if I could, I’d go back tomorrow. Today, I left the shirt in the drawer, fearing awkward glances from strangers at the grocery store or park. The sad irony of a little boy in Penn State gear this week, amidst all the mania, was too much to think about.
“And you want your son to go to Penn State?” Mike asked me the other night as we talked about the news that had just broke.
“Of course I do,” I said (that is, if he wants to, one day). “Scandals and terrible things can happen anywhere. You never know where it’ll come from.”
And that’s the scary thing, isn’t it? No one and no place is immune from terrible things. You can put your trust in a person or place you believe is most trust-worthy, and you’re still taking a leap of faith. We do what we can to minimize the chances of horrible things happening and we fill the spaces in between with the faith that good people, who far outnumber the bad, will rise to the occasion when needed.
In the Penn State story, it seems many good people had the chance to rise to the occasion. The reasons why they didn’t are surely varied and complex and ultimately not important. We all share in our outrage on behalf of the young men whose innocence was stolen from them by one man. And maybe, selfishly, what’s really rattling us is that our own faith was stolen from us by so many men.
Tags: introspection, soapbox, The Issues
