A Tragic Opportunity

This post is the editorial that I wrote for the December edition of our company newsletter.  

A Tragic Opportunity

by Lacey Reapsome

Penn State.  Jerry Sandusky.  Joe Paterno.  These are words and names that we have heard endlessly for weeks now.  Article after article, news report after news report, and facebook post after facebook post; news of the incident has been unavoidable. 

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 14^th, 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, and as a society.  The opportunity to right a wrong, and more importantly, the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others, which will hopefully allow us, as a society, to overcome the biases and mentalities which prevent even good men from doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. 

Link to David Brooks’ article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/brooks-lets-all-feel-superior.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=david%20brooks&st=cse