As a former Marysville middle-school boy, I paid particular attention to the case of a teacher lady who lived in Marysville (but worked in nearby Mukilteo).

Second-grade teacher Susan Lemery, 37, was arrested in late June. She was charged with having sex with one 14-year-old boy and fondling another. Both alleged partners are friends of her own teenage son.

I can assure you I had no specific private fantasies about any of my instructors during my years of tender budding manhood. But it’s easy to imagine that I could have, given the right circumstances and the right instructor. Cross-generational desire (in both directions, and among all gender-persuasions) is one of the perfectly natural sexual occurrances. Countless adolescents have dreamed of the experienced awakener who would gently guide them toward intimate awakening. Countless grownups have yearned for the fresh-faced plaything who would help them recapture their lost youth.

But once reality sets in, there are all sorts of power and control games going on; particularly if the boy or girl is emotionally malleable and manipulable (as so many boys and girls that age are).

Even harsher power and control games begin once a relationship of this sort becomes public knowledge, as a community’s well-meaning adults rush in to proclaim their outrage and cry for strict punishment and social control mechanisms to prevent any future such abuses of power.

And thus it will always be in America, unless by some miracle American adults learn to be more grown up.

By that, I mean that we collectively accept that all these desires exist and learn to exist with them; concocting wholesome and supportive ways for these fantasies to be addressed, without turning any real-life kids into commodities or stunting their emotional growth.

And no, I don’t know what that would be. But it would start with the acceptance and understanding of human nature, not its inhibition or suppression.