Wednesday, November 9, 2011

When Good(?) Men do Nothing

Colin,

Our world is often a strange and sick place. Things happen that should never be allowed to happen. Intelligent, grown people fail to act when they know that taking action could prevent further harm from happening. We, as humans, often fail to remember that we are charged to take care of one another and not just ourselves (Note: for those who follow real life news...yes, the Penn State debacle spurred this post). And, we as adult human beings are charged with protecting the innocent among us...children. For a father who still often feels that he failed to protect his own son, the perverse and sickening allegations of an alleged pedophile are enough to make me vomit, but the fact that so many grown men did nothing beyond the bare minimum...at best...to stop such heinous acts is beyond reproach. To put so little value in the children's well-being, their safety, and their hopes of a promising future is inexcusable.

How does this all relate to you? Well, I think all parents who have had a child die feel far more protective and have more intense reactions to people who purposefully harm any child, and your Daddy is no different. Having you die has made me very protective of Ava and your Mommy. Knowing how precious and fleeting life is has made me sensitive to things mass media and 24 hour news networks had rendered desensitized. Seeing people celebrate someone's death or demise, child abuse stories, murder, rape, and every other "if it bleeds it leads" type of story actually hurts to some degree or another now...and it should.

Hopefully the unfolding of the story at Penn State proves to not be as insidious as it appears, and hopefully someone, anyone, will stand up and do the right thing. Because, as Edmund Burke puts it "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

I love you!
Daddy

2 comments:

  1. I've always wondered how someone could be content with pretending bad things weren't happening around them because they didn't want to be involved in doing something to stop it.

    The drama situation I wrote about a few weeks ago is something similar. Ok, well not as in dealing with pedophiles, but as in someone doing something wrong and no one ever doing anything about it. That's why it always continues. Because no one ever steps up to stop it. Or even to just confront it.

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  2. The Penn State drama has opened up a can of worms of feelings for me, too. In elementary school I had a (male) teacher sexually molest several boys in my class, in front of the class. He was never reprimanded. We moved that next year but I heard through the grapevine that one of the parents got it on videotape and he was issued a "get out or you'll wish you had" threat. He DID leave, but he just went to another school. Now he works for the state education department. Great punishment, huh?

    As a kid, none of the adults that I knew did anything about it. As children, we assumed that the adults in our lives DID know and did nothing so most of us figured that his actions couldn't be that bad if he wasn't getting in trouble. Looking back, I"m not so sure who really knew at the time and who didn't but as a parent with a child I couldn't imagine not bringing the wrath of GOD down.

    I feel horrible for the Penn State boys because no matter how harshly he is punished, they have been punished far worse. In some cases, sitting back and doing nothing, even as a good man, can be just as bad to the child as the actions of the perp.

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