I'm Back, and Paterno's Gone

I'm back, that is, from the LHAT convention, about which I hope to say more later.  And Paterno's not only gone from this mortal coil, but his statutory presence has been banned from the campus of Penn State.

Regarding the latter, there seem to be two schools of thought:  one, that the statue should have stayed because the good in Paterno's life outweighed the bad, and two, that the statue needed to be removed because it had become a source of division on campus and was otherwise a distraction from the university's institutional need to repent, reform, compensate and otherwise move on.

I always think that there's a third alternative.  At least.  And, at least for me, that's the case here.

Removing the statue strikes me as a form of Orwellian re-writing of history.  Good and bad, Paterno is part of the university's history.  The making and installation of the statue reflects that fact, and taking it down does not change it.  I can understand their concern about vandalism, but I'm not sure even that justifies taking the statue down.  Do we want to dismantle every historic structure because its associations are controversial?  Do we not do a disservice to history, and ourselves in the process, by doing so?  Besides, the statue is huge.  Any vandal capable of harming it would be noticed and stopped long before he or she got to it.

Let me be clear, however:  I am NOT in favor of doing nothing.  Paterno was complicit in the covering up of the child abuse sins that occurred on his watch.  No one should forget that.

And that is why I was (and am) in favor of leaving the statue where it was, with one small change.  Opposite it should have been placed a statue of a small boy, staring at Paterno with astonishment and heartbreak.  And, at the base of the new statute, the following quote, in letter too large to ignore:

"WHY?" 

That about covers it.  Context is everything when it comes to history.  History doesn't change, but, as in this case, the context in which we understand it has.