I don’t regularly turn to ESPN for my news, but my wife and I happened to be at a bar last week while a round table of three or four guys in suits were discussing the then-upcoming Penn State and Nebraska football game. The question came up, “What does a coach say to motivate his team in that kind of situation?”
This prompted in me two responses:
First: Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck football and fuck you.
Second: An immediate headache resulting from the repeated cycling-through of the above.
In case you haven’t heard, the “that kind of situation” these well-compensated analysts were discussing was boy rape. Boy rape. Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky had, for years, been raping children. With his cock. And the big question—what really mattered—was how was this going to affect the football game on Saturday.
Am I wrong, or should every single abused child in the world prompt an immediate ceasing of all activity? I mean everything. Everybody hits the brakes. Some things you stop, and you correct. You take that time. What you don’t do is sit around a table and ask how the fact that Jerry Sandusky was fucking little boys is going to show up in the score. All those years, all that victim rage, all that shame? And the story finally breaks, after all this time, and here are these stupid fucking Neanderthal clowns talking about football.
Sometimes it’s more than just a regular suspicion. Sometimes I know, the way I know that up is where I point when I point up, that I’m from another planet. I have no other explanation for why something like that disgusts me to my core and somehow we all gloss over it like some scumbag piece of shit taking showers with someone’s child is secondary to who’s gonna make it to the end zone more than the other guy. My stomach turned. It was like I couldn’t punch enough of everything.
I’m 30 years old. Sandusky spent literally half my life in the practice of routinely forcing boys into sex. 40 counts over 15 years. And I know people do it all the time, but seriously, something like this comes to light, and no one even cares. It’s news, but it’s voyeur news. It’s news you watch because it’s shocking, not because you give a shit. It’s spectacle. It’s meaningless. You follow it until something else comes on and then you stop. Next week, I’ll write about some other thing that pisses me off. It’s sickening.
This is the world we’ve made. This is what we did with being on top of the food chain. Our big brains we put to work secretly raping children. We evolved into this.
I refuse to believe we’re worth saving. We let people starve, we rape, we kill, we steal from each other, we cheat. If you and I were hungry, stuck on an island, and I had a piece of pie, I would gouge your eye out with a fork just so I didn’t have to share. That’s who we are. How can anyone believe in humanity? How can “hope” be something marketable? How can we keep falling for it again and again and again?
Nothing gets better, nothing gets worse: It’s just always shit on the dick of some raping motherfucker. If you can read this, that’s your species.
On some level, maybe everyone knows that, and that’s why we numb ourselves out. With football, with booze, with terrible food, drugs or whatever else. Maybe we know it’s hopeless, and so when nothing matters at all, we can fool ourselves into thinking things like college football games do. Maybe that’s the appeal. I’d almost rather think that. It’s almost justifiable at that point. Tragic, but also sympathetic. Too bad it’s not even close to being true.
JJ Koczan
jj@theaquarian.com
