I woke this morning, picked up my laptop, clicked it on and took a deep breath, just like I have every morning this week.
What horrible development will I find out about this morning? What damaging revelation will continue the unraveling of our university and community? And when will the other shoe drop for Jim Boeheim?
Thankfully, for once this week, I didn't see anything too terrible. I'm also not naive enough to believe that will hold for very long.
We're at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Fines, SU's internal investigation and whatever else is waiting for us around the bend.
About the only things I've seen today are more people discussing whether ESPN & The Post-Standard did the wrong thing in not releasing the tape or at the very least should have done more digging.
As animated as I've been about this discussion, I think I'm ready to move on from it. We've made our point. If you're going to blame Joe Paterno for not coming forward, ESPN/Post-Standard should be held to the same moral standard, journalists or not. Will there be "punishment" over this? Probably not. This is a morality discussion, remember.
I saw a tweet making fun of SU fans the other day that went something like this - "Quick, who else can we blame to distract ourselves from the fact that Bernie Fine is a pedophile?" While we remain in a nightmare world of perpetual allegations and don't know for sure what exactly Bernie Fine is, there's a point in that. It's true that while so much of the "how, who and why" involved in this story coming to everyone's attention is dubious, it's still happening and it's still real.
Stories about those who have been abused are beginning to break through the clutter. And if there's any good that's coming out of this and the Penn State situation, it's that. Stories like those of Joe Ehrmann and Syracuse's Vera House are stories that needed to be heard, scandals or not.
I can't say I'll always follow my own advice. I get riled up every time I see someone from a national outlet or from some city 2,000 miles away from Central New York preach morally about what should have happened and what Jim Boeheim's fate should be.
As if we don't know ourselves what should have happened. As if we don't know that Jim Boeheim made a critical error in judgement and feels remorse.
Then again, I get it. Everyone's gotta get it out of their system right now. Everyone has a strong opinion about all of this and they need it be heard. I know, I live in the Twitter Age.
Anyway, I'm rambling at this point. The point is, despite the fact that we're not even 10% through this mess, the more we can try to remember this is about bringing sexual abuse crimes, even alleged ones, to the surface, the better. Tomorrow morning we might wake up some more news that will make that hard. But, let's keep trying.