Two Thanksgiving Dinners. A tale of very different realites, one of Polar Bears and the other of Pederasty.
On Sunday, my riding friend had an early Thanksgiving dinner for her friends and some neighbors. It started with hors d'oeuvres and drinks. As we had drinks, one of the neighbors turned on a football game, so conversation subsided. When we could talk, away from the TV, one of the neighbors started talking about all the excess Polar Bears that are migrating south and invading populated areas because the "poles are melting due to global warming."
I said, weren't we just warned a couple of years ago that Polar Bears were becoming extinct because the "poles are melting from global warming"?
Well, which is it?
Here is what it is: It is Global Warming is a Hoax!
So I caused trouble.
Things were more peaceful with the TV on.
Come Thanksgiving, I was invited to a relative's house. His in-laws live for sports. He does too. Soooo, the football game is on the GIANT TV that can be seen everywhere, no just in the house, but the whole block.
I exaggerate, a little.
The game was on during the meal and I could see it any time I wanted, but I wanted not.
Since football was omnipresent, the subject of Penn State came up. It turns out, much to the contrary of the indictments, that some of the victims are just making this stuff up or exaggerating. So the idiots football fanatic frat boys (and girls) at Penn State were right to protest the firing for the pederasty and those who covered it up? According to "fans" at that Thanksgiving Dinner they were.
Maybe it was the turkey, or knowing it wouldn't be worth my time arguing, but I didn't get into it with them. It would have been ugly.
"...We are Penn State!”
One student participant said of Paterno’s firing that “having that taken away from us made us feel lost.”
The initial shock of the child-abuse scandal at Penn State was disturbing enough — but what came later may have been even more so.
That Joe Paterno, other coaches, and members of the administration could have failed in a straightforward, utterly uncomplicated moral task — to protect defenseless children from rape — is almost mind-numbing. No weighing of competing interests or complex variables was required. On one hand, you had children being abused, and on the other, the reputation of a hugely profitable football program. They chose the football program. In a condign coda, they’ve done far more damage to the program’s reputation by choosing the immoral path than they would have by doing the right thing. If the alleged predator, Jerry Sandusky, had been arrested for child abuse in 2002 (or at any point in the previous decade as reports filtered up of his criminal conduct), it would have been a one-day story. Instead, the beloved Joe Paterno has been fired. The president of the university is out, and Penn State stands revealed (and reviled) as a corrupt institution.
When people violate our standards of decency, our desire for justice demands a certain social sanction. A crime or sin is a tear in the social fabric, and our collective disapproval and censure is the way we begin to repair it. When that process breaks down, it makes us feel insecure, and makes the transgression all the more threatening.
So it was almost as dismaying to see the response of a mob of Penn State students to the ouster of Paterno as it was to hear about the child abuse itself. When word of the firings first reached campus, thousands of students surged from their dorms and rampaged down the streets of State College, Pa., blowing air horns and other noisemakers in the middle of the night. They chanted Paterno’s name, threw rocks and fireworks at police, knocked down two light poles, and overturned and crushed a local TV-news truck. According to the New York Times, the mob also tore down street signs, smashed car windows, and tipped over trash cans and newspaper-vending boxes. Call it Occupy State College. The only missing piece was public defecation.
-read on at link-
