Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     This past Sunday the legend of Penn State University Joe Paterno passed away. For someone who always lived a larger than life existence the last year of his life was filled with a turmoil that many of us can’t even begin to imagine.

     When one looks at his life they will take into account 45 years coaching college football at Penn State as well as having the winningest record of any college coach. We will see what he meant to the university and to the students and alumni. We will see him as a family man and a pillar of the community. But in the same way that an asterisk marked Cardinals slugger Mark McGuire’s 62^nd home run, his life will forever be attached to a footnote concerning the scandal that surrounded his termination from Penn State.

     It is easy to forget that he wasn’t actually the one who perpetrated the crime here, but rather he was tried in the court of public opinion and the media as a guilty party to the crime because of the way it was handled. The fact that the crime happened while on his watch wasn’t the reason he was given walking papers, for if it really was, Kirk should have had his bags set outside the Coralville Mall long ago. No folks, it was because of the way it was handled after it came to light.

     I’m not a fan of JoPa. Nor am I a fan of young men being molested by coaches, but I am bothered a bit by the stigma that was placed at Joe’s feet by the constant media scrutiny. Oh sure, it is easy to sit outside the boundaries of Pennsylvania and point fingers and create conjecture as to what was known and when. But in all honesty it doesn’t have to take place in State College to hit close to home. It happens in our communities constantly.

Think about it for a minute. There are a number of people in our communities, me included, that have screwed up in one way or the other and at some point been labeled only by their action of that one time. It can be an embezzlement, a divorce, an affair, going bankrupt, loosing a job or even dating the wrong person. It is so easy for us to pigeonhole people and think of them only based on that tiny increment of time, when better judgment or actions outside of their control brought upon their own shame.

We tend to forget what people have done outside of their mistakes. We neglect the work they have done, their actions, or the fact that sometimes life just hands you a curve ball when you weren’t looking when we make up our “labels”. We then think of those people in the terms of that one period of time. We label them cheaters, thieves, home wreckers, losers, outcasts and much more. We even paste labels to them that we would be embarrassed to tell our mothers about. We get so wrapped up in what they have done wrong that we loose sight that we are talking about a human being with all the fallacies that come with being one. We aren’t perfect. None of us can make it from cradle to grave without some skeleton hiding out in the closet. But there are sure too many people who are willing to drag those skeletons in the street for everyone to see, instead of leaving them to turn to dust.

JoPa, unlike Nixon, will never have the luxury of additional years to rebuild his credibility in the public eye. The end of his life won’t give him that opportunity. Unfortunately, there are many people in our daily lives that don’t get that opportunity as well. We continue to label them and never give them the opportunity to prove otherwise, only because we are so blinded by the label we have placed upon them. It’s unfair to all of us and certainly not what you and I were taught on Sunday mornings.

See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.