One man's take on the Penn State sex-abuse scandal

You are a chef.

In fact, you are the chef of one of the best restaurants in the U.S., and your cooking is the main attraction.

One day, a new server tells you that a friend of yours who worked at the restaurant three years ago was doing something that looked like sexual assault after hours in the restaurant the night before.

So you decide to tell your boss about the allegation.

Your boss investigates the situation and tells the man who was accused to never come back to the restaurant again.

Time passes by and you see the accused man in another area of town. Obviously, he has not been arrested. Suddenly you are struck with two options. You can either pretend you never saw him or you can make sure the police were informed of the recent allegation against him.

Being the extremely busy chef you are, you decide to stay out of it, hoping to never hear of it again.

Nine years later, you read a grand jury report with a laundry list of sexual-abuse allegations against your old friend. You feel terrible. You know you should have done more to make sure the police were informed nine years ago.

Your boss is fired, and suddenly the assistant manager fires you too. For the rest of your life, you will be remembered as an enabler of sexual abuse and a disgrace to society.

You, the chef, were negligent. But before we play the moral game and decide what you, the reader, would have done in this situation, let’s face the fact that we are negligent all the time.

Within the next few months, a girl who attends San Jose State University will get raped. We all know this, and if you’re anything like me, you hate thinking about it.

There are plenty of things we could do to limit the amounts of sexual assault on and near our campus.

We could have watchdogs at parties who specifically keep an eye out for potential rape victims.

We could have a rule on campus that boys and girls can not be in the same room together past a certain time at night.

I realize that these suggestions may sound ridiculous, but shouldn’t we do anything in our power to limit the potential of rape at college?

Instead we do nothing. Essentially, we are accepting that college girls get raped, negligent to the issue.

Every time we get in a car, we accept that tens of thousands of people will get killed in auto accidents. Yet we drive anyway.

We are all cowards to some extent, not so much different than Chef Paterno.

So the next time you are downgrading someone, I want you to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself this question: Do you want society to take you down before you have the chance to defend yourself?