{"id":3251,"date":"2012-07-13T16:03:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T20:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3251"},"modified":"2012-07-13T18:48:38","modified_gmt":"2012-07-13T22:48:38","slug":"sandusky-i-had-the-opposite-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3251","title":{"rendered":"Sandusky: I Had The Opposite Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Previous I Read The News Today Entry<\/a> | Next I Read The News Today Entry<\/p>\n

Sandusky: I Had The Opposite Story<\/h2>\n

I have been reading, in the light of Louis Freeh\u2019s report about the coverup of the Jerry Sandusky child rapes at Penn State, about the horrible lifelong effects of sexual abuse<\/span><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 I can only breathe a sigh of gratitude for a family that kept it from happening to me.\u00a0 Because it could have happened if they hadn\u2019t responded so correctly.\u00a0 I had nearly forgotten about this, but the Sandusky tale brought it back.<\/p>\n

My maternal grandmother\u2019s hospitality to family members was legendary.\u00a0 In the Depression, more than one of them had come to her house to die.\u00a0 By the 1950s, almost all of her generation were gone, but she still had an alcoholic brother, Uncle Tom, about whom the story was that he had not been right since he\u2019d been kicked in the head by a horse as a child.\u00a0 Whatever the truth of that story, he was certainly peculiar, but always welcome at holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.<\/p>\n

This particular year (probably 1956 or 1957), I was in the parlor of my grandparents\u2019 Boston home.\u00a0 Most of the grownups were in the kitchen.\u00a0 Tom was sitting in an armchair in the parlor, and I was playing.\u00a0 Tom started talking to me, got me sitting on his lap.\u00a0 Grownups often had me on their laps, and I didn\u2019t think anything of it.\u00a0 But then he was touching me strangely, and the questions started, very insistent ones, about whether I liked to play with myself, a phrase whose meaning I did not even understand at the time.\u00a0 Tom seemed disappointed that I did not follow what he was asking.\u00a0 Somehow I extricated myself, and, thoroughly weirded out, wandered into the kitchen.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember what I said or to whom I said it, but I told someone what Tom was asking me.<\/p>\n

The consequences were immediate.\u00a0 My grandmother marched into the parlor and started yelling at Tom, and the next thing I knew, he was no longer a Thanksgiving guest.\u00a0 No one explained to me what it was all about, but I understood that it had something to do with the questions Tom had been asking me.\u00a0 Instead of circling the adult wagons around Tom or minimizing his behavior, the entire family circle instantly believed me when I told the story, and took immediate, decisive action.\u00a0 Tom did turn up at later family gatherings, but never came near me again.\u00a0 Probably he\u2019d been warned not even to think of it.<\/p>\n

My family was not perfect in every way (no one\u2019s is), but if they had done nothing else right, they acquitted themselves with great honor that day.\u00a0 If the powers that be at Penn State had half the sense of right and wrong, half the integrity that my family had shown forty years earlier, there would be several, maybe dozens, of young men today who would not now be struggling with demons whose acquaintance I fortunately never made.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Uncle Tom was a known drunk, and had other known mental health issues, while Sandusky was prestigious and well-connected amongst Happy Valley’s powerful.\u00a0 But then again, so far as I know, my relatives never heard any eyewitness accounts of Tom raping anyone.\u00a0 So it kind of evens out.<\/p>\n

It was not merely that Tom\u2019s sexual designs on me were foiled, let me add, but that the adults around me had proven themselves reliable.\u00a0 You could share icky information with them and they wouldn\u2019t come down on you.\u00a0 Instead, they would process it as adults, and do the primary job of adults around children, protecting them.\u00a0 They came through for me when I needed it in ways I literally couldn\u2019t even imagine.\u00a0 Just as bad experiences do, good ones reverberate through life.\u00a0 And this one has stayed with me, become part of me.\u00a0 I could be a more trusting person because I had encountered trustworthiness.<\/p>\n

I am grateful for this, even as I empathize with the youngsters in Happy Valley who were not as lucky.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Previous I Read The News Today Entry<\/a> | Next I Read The News Today Entry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My family was not perfect in every way (no one\u2019s is), but if they had done nothing else right, they acquitted themselves with great honor that day. If the powers that be at Penn State had half the sense of right and wrong, half the integrity that my family had shown forty years earlier, there would be several, maybe dozens, of young men today who would not now be struggling with demons whose acquaintance I fortunately never made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[791,4],"tags":[3532,3531,3528,3527,3526,3529,3530,3534,3533],"class_list":["post-3251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-i-read-the-news-today","category-closeup","tag-3532","tag-3531","tag-child-sexual-abuse","tag-jerry-sandusky","tag-louis-freeh","tag-penn-state-university","tag-pennsylvania-state-university","tag-protection-of-children","tag-uncle-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3264,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions\/3264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}