A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well
than a fool can from a mountain top.
Unknown
The Penn State Scandal Continues...
We know it happens all the time: people look the other way as others are viciously attacked, raped or hit by a runaway driver. "It's not my problem... I don't want to get involved; they could come after me next." We have to do what we can. It's even become part of the unauthorized immigrant debate; aliens are afraid of coming forward in as potential witnesses for fear they could be deported for coming forward.
I think we have to do something; I'm not sure to what extent it is necessary to put these things into law, but the Penn State scandal may be cause for action; there are things that any civilized person should know to act without trying to rationalize an excuse. What if it was you left for dead on a city street? What if it was your daughter, sister, or mother whom had been raped?
I've given a couple of incidents where I felt compelled to act and which I've described in an earlier post. I'll summarize them here briefly. First, several years ago when I arrived at the Orlando Naval Base (a training base for our nuclear fleet), I checked into temporary BOQ's, in this case a duplex until I rented an apartment near the base. There was a shared bathroom between units; one afternoon I heard a woman in the other unit screaming for help. She entered the bathroom and started banging on my door. I let her leave through my apartment while I held an enraged man, trying to follow her through the door but I blocked him. He was yelling at me that it was none of my business, she was his wife, and he was going to kill me. I shoved him back with the door and latched it. (I later went to report the incident, and the military police laughed it off.)
The second incident I mentioned involved a young unmarried couple living upstairs from me. One weekday I was in my apartment when I heard the young lady repeatedly scream for help in the hallways (there were 3 stories, maybe 2 or 3 apartments per floor). I lived on the bottom/basement floor; I went up my half-flight of stairs to the building entrance. I looked up the half-flight to their apartment and saw the lady's belongings strewn about the steps. It was drizzly outside; the young woman was, at most, 5 feet even, maybe 90 pounds. She was wearing jeans too long for her; the extra material covered her feet. He, maybe my height or so, had caught up with her before she could leave in a white car. The girl saw me standing at the entrance and made her way to me; he saw me and also approached me for help. They were both pleading for me to call for the police, each claiming the other was abusing him or her. Hmmm. Who do I believe? Maybe the young woman supporting a purplish black eye swelling it shut? The young lady's behavior was odd to me--she was alternating from screaming at him and threatening he was going to go to jail for what he did to her (thumbs UP!) and then crying that she didn't want to see him go to jail. I had left my cellphone downstairs, but somebody else must have seen or heard her and called the cops (thank God) because I could hear the police cars approaching within maybe 5 to 10 minutes. All I knew was I wasn't going to leave him alone with her; let him pick a fight with a guy more his size, whom can bench press over 350 pounds. The cops sized up the situation fairly quickly and the male cop handcuffed the young man. The policewoman told me the situation was under control; as I left, I heard the young woman plead with the policewoman that he only got that way when he was on drugs and she was trying to get him to stop; she figured what he really needed was for the police to spread the fear of God into him and then let him go. She told the policewoman when he was on drugs, he got paranoid; he thought that the FBI was spying on them and suspected their upstairs neighbors and I were colluding in a plot to gas their apartment.
I swear to God I felt like driving that young woman to her parents' house if I only knew where it was. The building I was in was going through a major renovation and I moved to another building further down the renovation list. The police never contacted me about being a witness although I made sure they had my contact information. The reason I mention the renovation is I saw the young man one more time several weeks later after arriving home from work. He greeted me as if we were longtime friends. All I could see was his girlfriend's black eye in my mind and thinking I had one or 2 nieces her age. I have no respect for any man whom physically or verbally abuses a woman or child.
But going back to the opening paragraph, it occurs in other cultures as well. I didn't feature a video that surfaced about 3 weeks ago because I was very, very upset about it; it breaks my heart. It was a video capture of a 2-year-old Chinese girl Yue Yue whom wandered into the street and was run over first by a van and then by a truck. If it wasn't bad enough the vehicles fled from the scene, leaving a dying little girl. For SEVERAL MINUTES, several vehicles and passersby moved around the injured girl, nobody lifting a finger, not even to contact the authorities. Finally, a 57-year-old rag collector carries the girl out of the street and desperately looks for the mother, getting nowhere with unsympathetic shopkeepers. (For an English report of the incident, see here.) Her mother had just walked her home from kindergarten and left her briefly alone at the family's hardware store while she gathered some clothes; the little girl had wandered off from the store when the accident happened. There are so many things about this story that angered me. For example, the van driver, eventually in custody, was hoping the little girl died because he would be fined a lot less... Then, of course, there are those people holding the mother primarily responsible, not the van driver whom was talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone. She died 3 days later (see additional news details under the Youtube video).
By the way, I have zero patience for any insensitive person playing the "blame the parent" game under these circumstances. All it takes is a few seconds; the mother probably thought she was being watched by another family member--and who knows? Maybe while the relative was processing the customer's order, the girl wandered outside. I still remember a story of a father leaving the house, not realizing his young daughter had followed him out of the house; she was behind the car when he backed out, never seeing her or knowing she was there. He has to live with the knowledge every day for the rest of his life that he accidentally killed his beloved daughter.
There are things about Penn State story that disturb me which I didn't directly comment on in yesterday's post. There's the issue of McGreavy himself (the witness of the alleged 2002 sodomy of a 10-year-old boy by former defensive coordinator coach Sandusky). What exactly did he do when he saw Sandusky engaging in anal sex? Say "pardon for the interruption?" "What are you doing there?" "Stop it! Now!" Did he call campus security? Did he call the police? This doesn't take a lot of rocket science. Is he worried more about a 10-year-old boy having unauthorized access to a campus building? It doesn't take a genius to figure out the statutory rape of a minor is the same, on or off the Penn State campus. Why does McGreavy still have a job? Is it enough to say, "Hey, I passed the baton to Joe Paterno... It's out of my hands now." No way!!! What is this was YOUR son or nephew? So one controversy is the fact that the head football coach and the university president were fired, but what about the guy whom allegedly witnessed the original crime and thought it was enough to send it up the chain of command is STILL on the coaching staff? Did it ever occur to him why Sandusky was still interacting with minors 7 years after he caught Sandusky in the act? I don't mean to sound judgmental here; I certainly give him credit for reporting the incident to the university; he could have simply looked the other way.
Don't get me wrong--the perpetrator of the crime is principally responsible. McGreavy did not touch that little boy. But even if there was a gap in Pennsylvania law regarding the reporting of crimes, there was still a moral obligation. Yes, McGreavy was a graduate assistant at the time, but he was a mature adult capable of moral judgments.
There's a possibility this scandal could develop into a far worse scandal. There are RUMORS that Sandusky may have pimped out young male victims to rich Penn State alumni. I want to stress that no such charges have been filed yet, but the very fact such a monstrous evil is being seriously discussed is unnerving.
A Geothermal Energy Future?
MJ Perry of the Carpe Diem blog recently posted a story on this topic, pointing out that the we humans come up with ingenious ways of finding supply to meet demand (e.g., of energy). Just a few years ago natural gas prices were going through the roof and we were talking about importing liquid natural gas from the Middle East; today, with new techniques, there's talk of 100 years of plentiful domestic natural gas supplies.
Geothermal systems are, of course, not new; I recall learning about Iceland in elementary school. The basic idea behind EGS (enhanced geothermal systems) is to drill a few kilometers into the very hot earth rock/crust, using it to heat water piped to it, which then is used to drive turbines and generate electricity. This is a proverbial ultimate renewable source; the earth's core is always "on" (versus solar or wind energy). There's a pilot project going on now; potentially we could one day generate enough electricity to supply our current needs many times over. Potentially production costs could be driven down through economies of scale. The interested reader can find more information and relevant links here.
Political Humor
"Jon Huntsman, who is running for president, has 0 percent support. That means he's not even voting for himself." - Jay Leno
[In the boardroom after the debate last night, Donald Trump fired Huntsman from Presidential Apprentice because Huntsman did a lousy job managing the trade deficit as ambassador to China. And then when the Donald saw the first name on Jon Huntsman's list of references was Barack Obama, he fired him again.
Of course, Jon Huntsman knew he still had recognition problems with voters when Governor Perry asked Huntsman after the debate last night to bring Perry's rental car out front and gave him a nice tip...]
An original:
- "Name 3 candidates in last night's GOP Presidential Debate." "Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and then there's, uh, what's-his-name--he's the current governor of a really big state. Sounds like Chuck Berry. Don't worry--it'll come to me..."
Foreigner, "Break It Up"
