Bill Cosby ought to be convicted.

That doesn't mean that it's not sad.  

I was a child and then a teenager when The Cosby Show was on television.  Until 1987, I lived in rural Vermont, where my parents did not buy cable television and where NBC was a blur of static.  After 1987, I lived in a less isolated area, and for some reason my parents then decided to pay for regular cable.  However, that was also the year that I started high school, so I didn't spend as much time watching television as I otherwise might have.   

I just published this page; the draft of it had several additional paragraphs which were not published.  This has started to happen every once in a while this year.  Are people who hack my phone erasing what I write before I can publish it?

I'll try to write the rest of it again:

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My awareness of Bill Cosby was the awareness that the rest of the public had.  I thought that he was a good person; that's what he and the people who were part of his professional career wanted everyone to think.  There was nobody who didn't "love" Bill Cosby, the way that the public "loves" famous people whom it doesn't really know.  

Was it all a lie?  Was his goodness all a lie?  No, the good things weren't the lies; the lies were about the bad things.  Although he has probably stopped sexually assaulting people, he hasn't stopped lying.  

Unfortunately, he's not the only person of his age who made decisions, throughout his life, that were based on the moral dichotomy of a society that allowed his behavior.  Although he and others hid his criminal abuse of women, he and his accomplices must have thought that what he was doing wasn't wrong.  The number of people who have accused him of misconduct is around 60; that doesn't mean that there aren't more people who were victimized by him and by those who lied for him.  Almost none of his victims confronted him or sought help at the time of the crimes or soon after.  So many victims, over the span of so many years, not knowing each other, not knowing of the victims before or after them, individually concluded that there was nothing they could do.  They knew that they wouldn't be believed by society, knew that the police wouldn't help them, that the criminal justice system wouldn't help them, that, instead, they'd be called liars, that they'd be publicly slut-shamed, that they wouldn't be able to have careers anywhere, that they wouldn't be able to be hired to be cashiers.  Why would they have known that they couldn't talk about it without having their lives ruined if they didn't, like Mr. Cosby and his accomplices, know that the world condones the idea of a man's right to rape?  

Also unfortunately, many people who are much younger than Mr. Cosby are growing up in a world that condones the idea of a man's right to rape, and that thinks that men who are raped are even funnier than the female sluts who ask for it.  More specifically, the world condones the idea that a woman doesn't have the right not to be raped.  Men who are raped have failed a test of manhood; women who are raped are being shown their place.