They’ve earned the right to wander through a deserted stadium on a Saturday afternoon as shouts of “success with honor” ride autumn breezes through empty tunnels along with the cries of children being molested in a nearby locker room.
Gaylon Kent
Today’s Thought came from a 2012 column we wrote concerning the punishment handed out by the NCAA to Penn State University after assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse in June 2012. The following month the NCAA announced assorted penalties against Penn State, including probation, a fine, a ban on postseason games and scholarship restrictions. The NCAA, however, was so hell-bent on getting the Penn State football machine up and running again they began rescinding the penalties the following year and today it is as if Penn State had never harbored a child molester on their staff at all.
We get what we deserve in this life. Individually, those that have a plan for their life and spend their time executing that plan are, when their time comes to die, usually looking back at time they made serve them. Similarly, those that don’t have and work a plan for their life sometimes are looking back at time squandered.
We get what we deserve collectively, too. Citizens who do not pay attention to what their government is doing to them end up with a country mired in perpetual war and staggering, almost incomprehensible debt. It affects how we amuse ourselves, too. When we settle for the lowest common denominator we get TV that really isn’t worth the time or money we invest in it. In sports, when we don’t care what happens outside our stadiums and arenas we get bribery scandals and children get sexually abused.
Today, seven years after the Sandusky scandal broke, Michigan State is roiling from its own sex abuse scandal and Ohio State’s head football coach is serving a suspension because he was not completely forthright about abuse allegations by a member of his coaching staff. Soon enough, sex abuse will be a sanctioned Big Ten sport.
We deserve it. We always will.
Quotes are from Gaylon’s personal quote book, begun in 1988 in a hotel room in Berkeley, California.
