Penn State Scandal: Is Jerry Sandusky Cover-Up a Generational or Human Flaw?

When it comes to the child sex abuse scandal that has shaken Penn State University to its very foundation, there's one question that many of us are not going to get out of our heads anytime soon.

How could this happen?

It's the only question worth asking, really. The troubling part is that a truly definitive answer is still many moons away, as the trial of former Nittany Lions defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky will not be underway in the near future and will likely take some time to conclude.

For now, all we really have is the very thing that caused this whole situation to explode—the initial Grand Jury report. It's a 23-page horror story that tells you more than you want to know about Sandusky's misdeeds. Just as important, it effectively illustrates how his crimes were kept under wraps for more than a decade.

We all know about the big cover-up that resulted from a 2002 incident in which Nittany Lions assistant Mike McQueary claims he saw Sandusky raping a young boy in a campus shower. The story goes that McQueary told his father, and then he told legendary head football coach Joe Paterno.

Ultimately, a meeting was set up with Athletic Director Tim Curley and university police overseer Gary Schultz.

Nobody ever went to the cops.

There are myriad theories about what exactly led the individuals in question to ultimately sweep the 2002 incident—and indeed all of Sandusky's activities—under the rug. The most popular one is that Penn State under Paterno may as well have been a mafia family, and he was the don. Nothing ever left the family, and everything was handled internally.

Others, such as Washington Post guest writer Thomas L. Day, have suggested that the Penn State mess is essentially a generational thing. 

It's an interesting concept, and one that I find to be largely similar to the mafia idea.

Sandusky and Paterno, the two men joined at the hip at the absolute center of this scandal, come from the old school. The cliches about the old school tell us that they both come from a day and age where men solved their own problems. If that meant a man had to make his own laws—well, so be it.

I am still a very young lad, so to me the indication here is that my grandfather (rest his soul) would have acted in the same way as Paterno. Instead of calling the cops on a longtime colleague and friend, he would have handled the matter in his own way. If you are of my generation, the same is true of your grandfather.

This, my friends, is an utterly absurd notion.

For all the wild theories we can conjure, the Penn State scandal boils down to two main ingredients—the heinous crimes of a sick man and the inaction of men who should have known better.

Of the bunch, you can easily single out JoePa as being the man most directly responsible for the cover-up. Penn State was his university, and his decision not to act when he had the chance allowed Sandusky to carry on with his crimes for nearly another decade.

It does not need to be argued that Sandusky is a bad man. It can be argued that, at the very least, Paterno in this case was an indifferent good man. The same goes for the other men who failed to report Sandusky.

Given the situation, it's impossible not to think of one of Albert Einstein's most famous quotes:

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“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” 

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Good men looking on and doing nothing is a travesty that is not confined to one very specific generation. It is an innate human flaw, and one that we will likely never be rid of.

For all intents and purposes, it is this flaw that has led to Penn State's downfall. When this downfall is completed and filed nicely and neatly into the pages of history, it will and should be recorded as a tale of one bad man and several men who were less than good.

The ages of these men will be a footnote.