Former Penn State defensive coordinator and child molester, Jerry Sandusky, has been found guilty on 45 of 48 charges ranging everywhere from corrupting minors to being an all-around scum bag.
The guilty charges carry such a weight that Sandusky will be spending the rest of his natural life in prison. However, the best course of action for him at this point would probably be to grab the sharpest thing he can get his grubby little mitts on and drag it across his jugular. Something tells me that prison isn't going to be all puppy dogs and rainbows for him.
As the verdict rang out, I had one thought in my ever expansive mind: phase one complete. Paterno is dead, Sandusky will be soon, and now you go after the institution. Brick for brick this place was evil and brick for brick it will be taken down. There is too much in the shadows of every corner for the whole 'we didn't know' schtick to work anymore.
People knew and they covered it up. This whole thing has been shady since 1998 when they tried to get Sandusky for the first time. The Pennsylvanian District Attorney who was originally piecing a case against Sandusky disappeared for Christ sakes! He just up and went missing and they found his laptop in a river. That doesn't scream cover up, does it?
I had to stop myself but when Penn State released their statement on the verdict and how they were committed to finding out the truth about the former staff, I started laughing. They sounded like big tobacco trying to get me to smoke because there wasn't any parallel between cancer and smoking cigarettes.
George Costanza once said that if you truly believe something then it isn't a lie. These people had their heads up their asses for so long that they don't know any better. They have become so naive that they think they can say whatever they want and we'll just blindly nod our heads in approval.
I think the best way to handle this situation from this point on is exactly what you would do if you had a house with a history of murder in it. You would bulldoze it. That's exactly what should happen to Penn State. Erase it off the map. It has a taint to it that no statement or amount of bleach would be able to fix.
Raze it to the ground. Hey, build it again for all I care, just don't build your foundation on ruining young boy's lives and then covering it up. It tends to scare away the recruits for your football team.
There's going to be a lot more to this firestorm in the coming days and months. Sandusky's lawyers are going to do their best to make sure their client doesn't get skull crushed in the first thirty seconds that he's been administered to the state. And the good state of Pennsylvania is going to do their very best to find and prosecute everybody who had a dirty hand in this mess.
The thing that cannot be lost though is that some things can never be fixed. No matter what happens from this point on is just retribution and not redemption. There are lives, for better or for worse, that will never be the same or ever have the potential that most of us get. And that fucking sucks.
