Can’t unsay what shouldn’t be said

Isaiah Crowell has been saying and doing all the right things this week. Unfortunately — for the former Carver High running back and for countless outraged Americans — it’s what Crowell did last week that prompted this outpouring of remorse and atonement. It’s last week he would like to undo.

That can’t be done — or rather, undone. And therein lies the harsh lesson.

As has now been widely reported, and disseminated on social media, the Cleveland Browns running back posted a graphic to his Instagram account last week in reaction to the shooting deaths of two black men by white police officers. It depicts a hooded, black-clad figure that resembles a terrorist executioner, slitting the throat of a police officer.

It’s a repulsive, inexcusable image and message.

It was soon removed from Crowell’s account, and it had been posted before the tragic murders of five police officers in Dallas. That could be called unfortunate timing, except that it’s hardly a mitigating circumstance because there’s no time such a post would ever be appropriate.

The Browns organization was publicly critical (behind executive suite doors, given recent events and national tensions, team executives must have been apoplectic), calling the post “inappropriate and insensitive” and adding that “just an apology is insufficient.”

Crowell did indeed issue a public apology on his Twitter account which reads in part, “It was an extremely poor decision and I apologize for that mistake and for offending people … My values and beliefs do not match that image.” The post goes on to list by name the five Dallas police officers killed in the line of duty “who were providing protection while trying to keep peace.”

On Tuesday, Crowell apologized by telephone to Cleveland’s chief of police, and later said he will donate this season’s first game check, about $37,500, to the Dallas Fallen Officer Foundation.

All of which suggests Crowell is thinking rightly since the post, and none of which satisfactorily answers the obvious question of what he could possibly have been thinking at the time.

“By posting that picture,” he wrote, in what might be the most to-the-point sentence in his Twitter post, “I became part of the problem.”

Old wounds

Court documents unsealed this week in Pennsylvania include testimony that the late Joe Paterno, longtime Penn State head football coach, was told about assistant coach Jerry Sandusky molesting a teenage boy as early as 1976.

According to the 2014 testimony of the witness, now a man identified only as John Doe 150, Paterno’s response was something to the effect of “I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about.”

Some die-hard Paterno loyalists no doubt think such revelations now are excessive and unnecessary: After all, Paterno is dead and Sandusky is in prison. Isn’t it time to move on past all this sordid and tawdry stuff?

If only Sandusky’s victims had that option.

This story was originally published July 13, 2016 at 5:22 PM with the headline "Can’t unsay what shouldn’t be said."