Couch: For Lansing area, the Larry Nassar scandal is personal
Graham Couch
There are many emotions to endure right now about the Larry Nassar scandal if you live here. One of them is grief, for the victims, but also for the illusion we had of Michigan State University. There is a sense of loss for what we thought existed.
MSU is part of our identity. It’s who we are in Greater Lansing. Sometimes it’s why we’re here — employment or school or simply the richness of living in a university community.
When MSU is sick in some way, small or large, we all feel it.
We’re all hoping we’ll discover it’s a boil and not a cancer, something that can be taken out easily.
I don't know if that’s going to happen. If there’s one thing this week taught us, Nassar’s sentencing and the victim’s statements were not an ending, but a transition — to investigations, to painful introspection and to healing. Healing, though, only occurs if the right decisions are made moving forward, if accountability and transparency rule the day, if trust begins to be restored.
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For much of the country, which swooped in for a few days and saw this mess in our backyard, MSU is a school that must be burned down and rebuilt.
We know better. MSU is people. The university needs new leadership and to root out those who’ve fostered a culture that’s been slow to listen to sexual assault victims. But there are also loads of really good folks at MSU, in all sorts of roles, people who are appalled by what they’re witnessing, people eager to be part of the cultural fix. You probably know one or two of them.
Nassar is an MSU story. But he’s also a Greater Lansing story, be it the Twistars gymnastics club, where so many young children in this community have learned the sport, or the Holt community, where he lived and was a presence as an athletic trainer in the schools.
Nassar was among us. He did so much damage. You can feel the weight of it right now.
It’s heavy.
I keep hearing the impassioned question of one of the victims, Clasina Syrovy: “When girls came forward and told an adult, the adults didn’t listen. Why didn’t they listen!?”
So much hurt and disappointment and helplessness in her voice. No one to give her a satisfactory answer — just Larry Nassar staring downward and a judge who could only offer comfort.
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That was the moment I was rattled by the Nassar scandal, hearing Syrovy give her victim-impact statement on the fourth day of sentencing. It felt personal. Maybe it’s because Syrovy practiced at Great Lakes Gymnastics at Walter French on Lansing’s South Side back in the early 1990s. I’d been in there a couple times then. She’s a contemporary. I could have known her.
I’m guessing many of us have experienced that moment over the last two weeks or 16 months — when it struck you how big this was or bad this is.
Or, how close to home it hits.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
