Joe Paterno and the Penn State Child Abuse Horror

 Email This Post

It is my never-to-be-humble opinion that coach Joe Paterno from Penn State ought to be in jail.  Fired wasn’t enough.  Let’s see, endangering the welfare of minors, knowing kids were being molested and not reporting it to the police?  I don’t know, I think that should be actionable.
 
The other night just before I went to sleep, I turned on the computer looking to see if there’s anything I really need to talk about on my program the next day.  What I saw was a video of 2,000 moronic, amoral young people, spoiled rotten with no moral compass clapping, laughing, smiling and shouting, “We stand up for our school!  Paterno is our iconic hero!.”  These were totally misguided protests from creepy kids on the campus.  And they had nothing to say about the victims.  Me? I would throw them all out of school.

Jerry Sandusky abused little boys over a period of 15 years.  Not only that, but the story gets worse when you learn where some of them were “done”.  I would say, “More than ever Paterno should be fired. He took no moral responsibility and did not follow through on the information he knew so he could protect little kids.  And yet he talks about his 17 grandkids…”
 
Would he have felt differently if Sandusky had done one of his grandkids?  I don’t know.  Think he would’ve stepped forward to do anything?  What? And mess with Penn State football?  I don’t know, maybe he’d sacrifice one of his own grandkids too; I have no clue.  But those 2,000 students, who had no clue, morally, as to what this was really all about, make me sick for our future.  And the parents…if you’re parents of any of those kids who were out there, you should be embarrassed you produced critters like that.
 
Good for the board for not allowing Paterno to write the blueprint for his own exit.  He wanted to leave on his own terms.  Creep.  He wanted to finish out the season.  They got his butt out of there anyway.  He didn’t help the young victims of “alleged” sexual predator Jerry Sandusky, his former defensive coordinator, and he knew about it.
 
Paterno made a statement on Wednesday.  He described himself as “‘absolutely devastated’ by the recent indictment of Sandusky for 40 counts of sexual abuse across 15 years.”  He promised “to pray for the ‘comfort and relief’ of the victims identified.”  And he had the friggin’ gall to say, “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”  That’s an admission of guilt.  The victims probably wish he had done more too.
 
To add to this, the current assistant coach Mike McQueary, who was then a graduate assistant, walked into the Penn State shower to see Sandusky raping a 10 year old boy, and turned around and walked out.  He turned around and walked out.  He is 6’4″, 220 pounds, and he turned around and walked out.  He didn’t call the police.  He told his dad and he told Paterno.  “I saw it with my own eyes.”  And what did that bastard do?  Nothing.  Why?  Probably because he thinks, “I am God.  I am a football coach for Penn State.”
 
Loyal students camped outside Paterno’s house chanting, “Joe must stay!,” cheering a man who could’ve stopped a predator from attacking kids, had he just dialed 911.  They are cheering to keep him because football is king, success breeds power, power breeds influence, influence breeds a bullet-proof arrogance and most of our young people have absolutely no concept of morality.

Raising Boys Into Men

 Email This Post

I was reading William Bennett’s article, “Have We Forgotten How to Raise Boys Into Men?” and realized I talk about this on my program way too often, which is a sad state of affairs.  Bennett comments:

Fashioning men has never been easy, but today it seems particularly tough. Boys need heroes to embody the everlasting qualities of manhood: honor, duty, valor, and integrity.

Mostly I hear from women who marry young guys who play video games.

Bennett goes on to state:

Without such role models, boys will naturally choose perpetual childhood over the rigors of becoming a man-as many women, teachers, coaches, employers, and adults in authority can quickly attest to today.

Even though the National Organization of (I Don’t Know What Kind) of Women continues to bleat and lie, women are better educated, more ambitious, and more successful than men today than ever before.  But we see a real decline in manhood.  Men earning college degrees have fallen from 60% in 1970 to 43% in 2006.  In 1950, only five percent of men in the prime working age were unemployed.  Today, it’s at 20%, the highest ever recorded.

But that’s not even the biggest problem.  The biggest problem we have in our society today is men are more distant from their family and children than ever before.  The out-of-wedlock birthrate is over 40%.  Fathers are missing from their boys’ lives in devastating numbers. 

And, except on 9/11 when we talked about how the firefighters were heroes because of their honor, duty, valor and integrity, we’re left with basically two images of manhood:  machismo street hoods and males who refuse to grow up.  Kay Hymowitz, who’s a great writer, talks about this in her article: “Where Have the Good Men Gone?”

Young men were tuning in to cable channels… whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors… cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks.

… It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles – fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity – are obsolete. 

And then I came upon this blog by Thomas Matlock: “Raising Boys: A Dad’s Parenting Advice for Moms.” He brings up ten points about boys that moms forget or want to change.  Just a few include: “Think caveman,” ” Yes, it really is all about poop,” ” Pointless physical activity is perfect,” and “Bedtime is sacred.”

In my opinion, the basic problem we have in marriages today is a feminine disdain for masculinity and a refusal of males to rise to the occasion and act like strong men, not “wussies” afraid of their women.  We need them to embrace honor, duty, valor and integrity.  Instead we have at least two generations of boys raised to be male-looking girls.

There’s No Such Thing As Internet Anonymity

 Email This Post

Let me put things into perspective.  When I was a college professor, it was standard for students to fill out opinion surveys at the end of the course on what kind of job you did in the class.  Actually, when I was a student in college, we were asked to do the same thing and the opinions were anonymous.  Well, not in my case.  I always signed mine, because I felt if a crotchety, bitter student took out their failures, insecurities, and lack of effort on somebody who has an esteemed job and is earning a living and supporting a family, they ought to put down their name.  Otherwise, it presumes they expect something bad will happen if a teacher finds out.  That makes the teachers “bad” people and the students “good” people and I thought that was b.s. when I was a student.  So, I always signed mine, whether it was good or bad. 

When I got to be a college teacher, I gave that lecture.  If you are going to comment on me, good, bad or indifferent, you ought to stand up and be counted for your opinion.  Just like in a court, you have to face your accuser.  You shouldn’t be able to hide behind anonymity and hurt somebody.  Most students never signed them.  They were brought up with cowardice and the feeling of entitlement that somehow an 18-year-old kid knows what constitutes quality teaching based on whether or not they could do the work. 

Then we had the internet.  I’m not saying the internet is evil, just like electricity is not evil even though you can stick your finger inside a socket and die.  That does not make electricity evil.  The internet is not evil, but it can be used in an evil way, and it has been.  The greatest number of sites in any one category is porn.  It’s probably the number one way pedophiles get to rape, molest and murder your children.  Children give out all kinds of information because they are naïve and curious and thrill seeking and don’t get it.  I would also say most parents do not tightly supervise their kids’ use of cell phones and the internet in general. 

So, the internet has become a very dangerous place.  People can create accounts using other people’s names, they can hack in, they can put up horrible things, humiliate and try to destroy somebody and they can do all of this anonymously and they are protected by Google or whomever because they have a rule “we can’t tell.”  This is infuriating.  I got into a minor tussle, myself personally, where a website that has interesting information on one of my hobbies, also has forum sites where people use pseudonyms and the site protects the pseudonyms.  I don’t think there should be pseudonyms.  I see no reason for people to be able to comment on anything, anonymously.  I had a long discussion about that to the person running the site.  He thought there would be a lot more activity and therefore, he would make a lot more money, if it was anonymous.  Ok, so he follows the money. What can I do?

The anonymity, in my opinion, allows the worst in people to come out, especially kids.  Think about all the horrible things kids do to each other on Facebook and MySpace which have caused some kids to kill themselves, yet they are protected.  The anonymity allows evil to really flow.  So, it was interesting recently when there was an article in the New York Times saying “Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone.”  The article says:

Not too long ago, theorists fretted the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived.
 
Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.
 
Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online.
 
The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not.

I’m happy for  this erosion of anonymity which is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Experts say Web sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photographs and videos, have hastened this change.
 
People involved in riots also find themselves on the net.  If you do things in public in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Syria, activists have sometimes succeeded in identifying victims of dictatorial violence through anonymously uploaded YouTube videos.
 
They have also succeeded in identifying fakes: In a widely publicized case recently, a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian and called herself “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was revealed to be an American man, Tom MacMaster.

The internet is getting to be less and less a place where bad guys can hide.  Should you be concerned?  Yes, a lot of you are innocently putting up a lot of information which gives the bad guys ways to get to you and yours, e.g., by signing up for dating sites.
 
I’m pretty careful, but still I get emailed all sorts of things.  For about a month, I was getting requests to sign up for senior dating sites. I must admit that ticked me off; I showed them to my husband and we couldn’t stop laughing because I said it was the “senior” part that ticked me off the most!

When Bad Things Happen to Children

 Email This Post

On my SiriusXM show recently, I spoke about the meaning of life, and then I got this email from Lisa:

I heard part of your program today and you read about the different thoughts about the meaning of life… I’ve been thinking about that, too.

As the mother of a child who is dying of cancer, like many of us, we are losing our faith in a big powerful “daddy in the sky” that hears our prayers. I’ve heard from Christians that “God doesn’t give you what you can’t handle” but I can’t handle this. “God gives you strength to get through it” – no, He doesn’t. I’m about to lose my mind… the pain is much too great to bear. I hear that this is God’s plan, or that God needs another angel. If he needed another angel, he would just take one, HE WOULDN’T TORTURE THEM FIRST! How could he PLAN to put a child through this kind of HELL? What good could ever come out of this?

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month. We wear gold ribbons, but only 3% of cancer research goes to childhood cancers. Does anybody care? Is the meaning of life only to do research on the “popular” cancers because they are the ones that will make money for the one who finds the cure? My son’s cancer is so rare that he gets the same chemotherapy he would have had in the 1980s… it doesn’t get researched.

Please tell me what the meaning of life is!

If you look at God as a “big powerful daddy in the sky that hears [your] prayers” and will give you what you want, and if you are a good person, you can’t help but be disappointed on a daily basis. That doesn’t seem to be the way it works. 

I know no other pain on the face of the earth that is greater than a parent having to see their child suffer and die.   I think parents would rather they suffer and die and trade themselves in for their kids.  So, this is the worst torture, but this is not a test of God.  That someone’s child or husband or wife or parent or friend gets ill and dies is not a test of whether or not there is a God.  There isn’t a test of whether or not there is a God — that’s why it’s called “faith.” To say that “I’m dubious about God” because my prayers aren’t being answered in the way that I want, is, in my opinion, never to have understood faith in the first place, but just to have played a social role in which you call yourself “religious.” 

There is no explanation for these things.  And, I agree with Lisa when she writes:  “If he needed another angel, he would just take one, HE WOULDN’T TORTURE THEM FIRST!….What good could ever come out of this?”  I like that answer of hers.  I think telling somebody this is God’s plan is a little obnoxious and I always thought it was.  It’s your assumption God is planning this.  You have no proof of that.  People go back to the story of Job and what he had to suffer and Abraham who almost wiped out his own kid until God said, “I see you really love me.  You don’t have to do this.” 

There are some important concepts and issues here.  When any of us says “I can’t handle this,” yet we make it through every day, we are handling it.  “Handling it” doesn’t mean it feels good or it’s easy; “handling it” usually means we are surviving it and doing the best we can.

I don’t understand all of the mass murders of the world — Stalin, Pol Pot, Germany, Japan. I don’t understand how that’s God’s will or God’s plan. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.  And I don’t know how to put it together.  I don’t know how it’s God’s plan to have little children put in ovens and killed.  Or mommies and their children shot to death and put into a hole in the ground, naked.  I don’t understand how any of that is God’s plan.  So, I have no answer to that. 

This was not a theological thing where I was going to explain what life really means, other than there’s always been horror.  It’s like the horror films you see in the movies where there’s evil and someone in the church or somebody else finally squelches the evil and at the end you see the evil creeping up through the ground again. 

There is evil, there is disappointment, there is pain, there is everything.  So, ultimately, whether you really believe in God or not, we really need to hold on to each other.  There is something about touching the hand of another who corroborates your pain.  That’s why with parents in this situation, I always tell them to find other parents in this situation.  They will be the first ones to hug you and they won’t get tired of hearing from you like other relatives will.  It’s not they get tired, per se, it’s just they can’t do anything to help and it’s upsetting, so they don’t want to hear it anymore.  They are not being bad, they just don’t know how to fix it. They feel guilt and they feel uncomfortable and then they start feeling anger.  So, to go to people who have been there and done that is the way we hold on to each other.  Some people call that behavior the way God helps you go through things which are inexplicable. 

So, let’s not call bad things that happen “God’s plan,” because that hurts people.  God planned to hurt my kid?  You’re gonna tell me, there’s some higher power and I’m supposed to rise above that pain and say absolutely “I adore you?”  I think it’s a horrible thing to tell people.  I don’t think it’s good to tell kids God’s an all-powerful “daddy in the sky” who can do anything.  Well, then why isn’t he doing it for me?  I don’t like when people walk out of a bus that just been in a crash and they are alive and everyone else is dead and they say, “but for the grace of God.”  What the heck does that mean?  God intentionally wiped them out and kept you?

I think we want to feel special like we feel to a parent.  God is some kind of extension of parenthood.  We sometimes don’t realize how cruel we sound.  So, here’s my frame of reference for all of this.  There are evil things people do because they are evil.  There are horrible things that happen just because there are horrible things that happen.  The human body has weaknesses and that’s just the way it is.  There aren’t cures for everything because we are not good enough yet to produce them.  It’s hard to get money for things only a few people suffer from – Lisa is right about that.

The bottom line is we’ve got to hold on to each other.  That’s the immediate salvation: to hold on to each other’s love, support, and kind feeling.  It’s irrelevant if bad things are happening or not.  The way to make it through life, I believe, is to really be compassionate and to be open to compassion.  That’s what helps you get through the things that are inexplicable and horrible.

Paying for My Children’s Disrespect

 Email This Post

A family has two sons in their twenties who haven’t gotten past the teenage years of disrespect and ingratitude:
 

 Watch other videos at YouTube.com/DrLaura

Sleep Deprivation Can Even Make You Unethical

 Email This Post

An article in the New York Times about sleep said it’s a necessity, not a luxury. For a lot of people, it’s a luxury, but it turns out that it’s an absolute necessity on many levels.  And most of you are living in a state of chronic sleep deprivation, which is a really bad thing.

“Studies have shown that people function best after seven to eight hours of sleep.”  So it’s best at least to aim for seven.  Get this: In the last 50 years, “the average night’s sleep for adults in the United States dropped to six and a half hours from more than eight.”  Some experts predict that this is going to get worse, mainly because you folks permit yourselves to be distracted by emails, instant text messaging, online shopping, online porn…online anything.  That flat, little screen in front of you is robbing you of sleep.

Now, what does that mean?  Well I can’t blame it all on the fact that you’re doing the wrong things…you know, with advancing age (something I know nothing about yet), natural changes in sleep quality occur.  It’s not unusual for people, as they get older, to take longer to fall asleep….they tend to get sleepier early in the evening, and they tend to awaken earlier in the morning.  Much of the time  “is spent in the lighter stages of sleep,  less in the restorative deep sleep.  R.E.M. sleep, during which the mind processes emotions and memories and relieves stress, declines with age.”

There are some bad habits you have that can ruin your sleep also: 

• Not getting enough physical activity
• Not spending enough time outdoors (turns out “sunlight is the body’s main regulator of sleepiness and wakefulness”.  That’s hormonal.) 
• Crappy diet
• Sometimes “medications can disrupt sleep.”
• “Having a partner who snores.”
• Too much alcohol (it’s a nervous system depressant but, in fact, it disrupts sleep.)

And there are sleep-robbing health issues like arthritis that is painful, diabetes, depression, anxiety, sleep apnea, hot flashes…there are all kinds of things that happen that can disrupt our sleep.  But there are a number of reasons we need our sleep.  Restorative is at the top of the list.  Also, you look a lot more attractive when you’re rested.  Somebody actually paid to do a research project which in which photographs of people were taken when they had good sleep and when they hadn’t…and the research showed (I don’t know, did this research cost a million dollars?)  that when you sleep, you look better!  Really?  I love this kind of research – it’s a true waste of money.
 
Losing sleep also makes you fatter or at least fatter than you’d otherwise be.  Harvard looked at 68,000 middle-aged women, and followed them for 16 years, and “those who slept five hours or less each night were found to weigh 5.4 pounds more.”  This is a 16 year research project to get that answer?  Five pounds?  Two weeks of potato chips; we can do that.
 
Basically this is the case, because when you’re up later, you tend to nosh…munch, munch, munch.  You  could add a pound in two weeks.  So you need to get your sleep.  If you can take naps, they also help your brain function, and improve your energy, your mood, and your productivity. 

But I loved this tidbit from the Washington Post: “Sleep deprivation can make you unethical.”  Two business school professors did some research in sleep labs.  “They found that a lack of sleep led not just to poor performance on tasks that require ‘innovative thinking, risk analysis, strategic planning’- but also to increased deviant and unethical behavior.”  These people are ruder, have more inappropriate responses, and attempt to make money they haven’t earned.  They tend to cheat.  And the irony in this is that, in business, everybody gets so impressed if you’ve been up all night working on projects, papers, analysis, taking red-eye flights to meet clients…everybody considers you a hero.  Instead, companies should really be giving you sleep awareness training (If there is such a thing), because these workaholic cultures, without the restorative opportunities, actually “cost the U.S. economy some $150 billion annually in accidents and productivity losses.”  The percentage of folks “who sleep less than six hours a night has jumped from 13 to 20 percent” in the last 10 years.

So we become less ethical people and we don’t do what we have to do as well.  Other than that, if you don’t want to sleep, I suppose it’s just fine.
 
References:
 NY Times article 
Washington Post (5/13/11) article  

Quote of the Week

 Email This Post

The attacks of September 11th were intended to break our spirit.  Instead, we have emerged stronger and more unified….We are more determined than ever to live our lives in freedom.
               – Rudolph W. Giuliani
                  Former Mayor of New York City

This Sunday, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the fourth attack thwarted by the brave passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, remember those who were lost and the families they left behind.

I Stuck My Nose In and Got Backlash

 Email This Post

The urge can be irresistible: the husband of a relative finally has the guts to leave what you think is a bad marriage, and you think she’s to blame for it. Instead of keeping that thought to yourself, you pull some drama straight out of reality TV and tell her exactly what you think to her face. Your family has now turned you into an outcast… and you’re surprised?!

Watch other videos at YouTube.com/DrLaura