We are...
“I only know one thing about Penn State,” my friend says as we’re waiting in line for coffee. I’ve been excitedly chatting about my upcoming trip back to State College. I look at her, curious—what’s the one thing about Penn State that has made it all the way to Washington?
Oh right.
Jerry Sandusky: The assistant football coach currently in prison for molesting children. And the horrible revelations about the people who knew about the abuse and covered it up and the pervasive—and complicit—football-glorifying culture of the students and alumni.
Old Main looks pretty much like it did when we left (Photo by author)
Twenty-five years after our graduation, my friends and I walked around campus not recognizing things. There are gorgeous buildings that weren’t there before. The college of BioBehavioral Health, brand new when I graduated from it, has its own building now. The creamery was much bigger, and in a different place, but the Peachy Paterno was as sweet and creamy as ever, if more impolitic in its alliteration now. The bike racks are the same, but now they have electric bikes on them.
We hiked Mt. Nittany, and found it to be higher and steeper than I remember. (Must be because of a quarter-century worth of plate tectonics.) I wanted to replace a ratty Penn State t-shirt that had belonged to an old boyfriend when we were in college and now is thread-bare in the parts that aren’t actual rips and holes. We walked into the University Book Store to shop the logo gear. The front room of the store prominently displayed tablets and air pods that hadn’t even been dreamt of last time I was in this store.
(Photo by Regis, nice guy behind us in line. Young enough to be our kid.)
We visited the lion. Made of limestone, he looks more or less the same, though the sidewalk leading up to him is new. As we waited in line on this new sidewalk behind graduates young enough to be our kids, if our lives had gone just a bit differently, we reminisced about the last time we took photos at the lion, in our senior year at Penn State. We took dozens of shots that we wouldn’t see until we took our disposable cameras to the pharmacy to be developed. Shots of us pretending to be the lion, pretending to ride the lion, pretending to an irreverence that belies love and familiarity.
Have you heard the “We are” chant at Penn State football games? The cheerleaders lead the fans in a call and response: “When I say ‘We are’ you say ‘Penn State!’”
We are!
Penn State!
It’s impressive in a stadium of 80,000 people, and more so when used as a personal greeting among the hundreds of thousands of alumni scattered across the country.
As much as the place has changed and my friends and I have changed, we still are Penn State. Part of what is so grounding about meeting up with my friends from college is that they don’t know me by my job title or by association with my kids. They know me. As I was when I first ventured into adulthood. They know about the bad decisions, experiments, the time I dyed my hair black. Penn State is where I first heard of public health. Where I first considered marriage and a life on my own. Where I learned to drive. Where I sublet a series of ridiculous apartments, one of which came with a pregnant cat the landlord couldn’t ever find out about. I volunteered. I worked crappy jobs. I got fired. I raised 6 kittens on the downlow. I famously and disgustingly refused to clean the communal toilet for an entire summer just because my roommate had politely asked me to take my turn.
I mourned when information about the kids abused at Penn State came out. I mourned for the kids, for the fall of the heroes I believed in, and for my complicity in it. I felt shame for having been formed by and having benefited from an institution that covered up the rape of children for money.
What do we do when we uncover dark parts of ourselves and our history? When we learn that our heroes held human beings as slaves? When we learn that we ourselves have benefitted from genocide? That we’re standing on stolen land?
It's tempting just to look away. But I wonder—if we can see these terrible parts of our history clearly, in all their nauseating realness, without internalizing guilt, or denying truth, or attempting to justify the unjustifiable, maybe then we can choose a different path for the future. Maybe then we can allow ourselves and others to grow and change and be different. At the very least, maybe we can learn that we all live in glass houses and let that knowledge humble us, give us compassion for others, and make us wary of the secrets we keep. And maybe, as we say “never again” to the darknesses of our past, we can start to make it right.