A Tragic Opportunity
by Lacey Reapsome
The
wrong doings of these iconic figures in society hve brought many people pain
for the victims and their families, and anger toward the man who would dare to
do such a thing to innocent children and those who sat idly by. It has also brought about a broken, hurting
student body, both current students and alumni, whose laments have filled
editorial pages and facebook pages.
I
am reminded of a quote from Napoleon Hill, in which he stated that “Every
adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal
or greater benefit”. It is hard to turn
from our pain, anger, and self pity and realize that life is bigger than we
are, and that every adversity is an opportunity to become stronger and better
people, and an opportunity to reflect on our own faults and to learn and grow
from the failures of those around us.
David
Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote an article on November 14th,
2011 entitled Let’s All Feel Superior.
In his article, Brooks brings to light the psychological realities of
the human minds ways of dealing with horrific situations. Normalcy Biases, Motivated Blindness, and
self-deception prevent us from consciously believing something that our eyes
see. Our minds instinctively protect us
from viewing horrifying scenes. Brooks
references an experiment in which people were shown images, some containing
sexual content. Those participants who
were uncomfortable with sex never let their eyes dart over to the uncomfortable
parts of the pictures. In other words,
some element of the mind was aware of the content of the pictures before the
eyes drifted that way, thus preventing the eye from gazing upon something the
viewer did not want to see.
While
a large majority of us sit back and judge the actions of Joe Paterno, Mike
McQueary, and many of the other people who were somehow informed of the horrifying
acts of Jerry Sandusky with children in the showers of the locker rooms of the
Penn State football program, there are very few of us who would have the mental
strength and gumption to intervene or even to simply report the incident. Our self-deception allows us to fixate on the
facts that we like, and suppress the ones we do not. Brooks references a book entitled Blind Spots,
which points out that “when it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are
dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should
behave disappear.”
If
it is scientifically proven that we, as the human race, would, in a large
majority of cases, do the exact same thing that Joe Paterno and Mike McQueary
and a host of others did, why then do we feel that we can sit back and point
our fingers in astonishment and question how THEY could have let this
happen? What we should be doing instead
is to focus on the opportunity this tragic situation presents to us as students
and alumni, as citizens of the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania
