NCAA FootballSports & Politics

Penn State Students Are Camping Out To Protect The Joe Paterno Statue

Pressure from local and national media, alumni and nearly anyone else who’s heard about the Freeh report — not to mention a kind of scary airborne threat — has the Penn State administration considering removing the Joe Paterno statue on campus. Maybe. Eventually. However, if anyone tries to do that, they’ll have to go through this unfortunate brigade first.

Here are two tweets from a student journalist named Jeremy Kahn, which were brought to our attention by 96.1 Kiss:

Students are camping out overnight to protect the Joe Pa statue… twitter.com/KahnmanPSU/sta…

— Jeremy Kahn (@KahnmanPSU) July 18, 2012

Two campers right now, they say more coming. They’re trying to gather more supporters. twitter.com/KahnmanPSU/sta…

— Jeremy Kahn (@KahnmanPSU) July 18, 2012

This just goes to show how strong the cult of personality is around Joe Paterno, and how difficult it is to separate the football coach from the man. These two are presumably current students (who live in the area or are taking summer classes, or are just super, super bored) whose connection to Joe Pa is minimal compared to the thousands of others who crossed paths with the legend over the years. And yet, here they are, protecting the bronzed rendition of the guy as if he were still alive somewhere in there.

They say that the rights of the minority should be protected from the tyranny of the majority. But fellas — sometimes, the majority is the majority because (almost) everyone is in total agreement that something very wrong occurred here. Perhaps you two need to step back and reconsider why you’re the only ones doing this. And look: I came up with all kinds of reasons to skip class in college. (Oh, there’s a bake sale going at the Student Union? I need to support that right away. Oh, there’s a football game in two days? I need to start pre-gaming immediately.) But you two — and whoever else has joined them since — need to find a better excuse, because I get the feeling this one’s not going to cut it.

[reddit]

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