I know things have been kind of dead around here, but for good reason, I assure you. Three weeks ago, my co-reporter was on vacation, so I was pulling double-duty and really didn’t have time to post. Two weeks ago I was trying to stock up on copy so I could go on vacation with no looming to-do list left behind. This past week was my vacation. This coming week my not yield anything substantial as I’ve got a busy schedule ahead of me, but we’ll see.

One of the stories I might be catching up on is the Weixler case out of Mashpee. That was a throughly unpleasant story to work on for so many reasons, including the nagging knowledge that Weixler, a former Mashpee HS student-turned-teaching assistant, can pretty much kiss his entire future good-bye…unless, of course, there is a stunning and –at this juncture — improbable revelation that the whole scenario was cooked up by the alleged victim and is a complete fiction.

I say that twist is improbable based on things Weixler’s lawyer said (before he, wisely, clammed up and stopped talking to the press). Attorney Thomas Guiney said his client claimed the jailbait girls under his charge as a soccer coach were flirting with him, and chided the schools for failing to train Weixler how to resist such advances.

“These young males going into teaching, it’s a very dangerous time for them in this day and age,” Guiney said to various media outlets. “For these young teachers, it’s probably the first time in their lives they are getting so much attention from females, and they don’t know how to handle it…These young teachers don’t recognize boundaries…Before they throw these young teachers in the classroom, they should give them some training in boundaries.”

I think the best response to this line of BS came from Chief Rodney Collins of the MPD: No training the schools could provide would compensate for a character flaw. But I digress…

I have yet to hear of Guiney claiming outright innocense on his client’s behalf; reading between the lines in the lawyer’s statements, it seems he’s trying to show there were a wealth of extenuating circumstances, perhaps to lay the foundation for his defense and an effort to get the charges reduced to something that won’t land Weixler in the pen for a decade, minimum (as a teaching assistant, his is considered a “mandatory reporter” under the law, which means he is legally obligated to report to authorities any suspicions of child abuse. Under a new law enacted last year, mandatory reporters convicted of certain sex crimes serve a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence).

As said previously, unless some major revelation emerges in the trial, Weixler gets to spend at least the next 10 years in prison, where child molesters are welcomed with open arms (read “welcomed” as “pummeled” and “open arms” with “bars of soap wrapped in a towel”). After he gets out, what then? He’ll be a registered sex offender, which limits one’s options for housing and employment, and I can’t imagine he’d be welcomed in many social circles.

And all that for what? An (alleged) tumble with a 14-year-old? It doesn’t matter what the girls were doing — if anything — to “invite” Weixler’s attention. As a grown man, Weixler should have been smart enough and strong enough to resist and refuse, and he could have done so without compromising any non-sexual relationships he had with the young women.

In the theater company I work with in my leisure time, I come into contact with many young people, boys and girls, and I have seen directly the positive impact a platonic friendship with adults can have on their lives. It can bring shy teens out of their shells and build a self-confidence they previously lacked. It can expose them to the possibilites in their lives they’ve perhaps never seen before. It can help them endure personal trials and tragedies. And if the adult is honest enough to remember what life was like for them as a teen, a friendship with an adult can provide a young person with someone who truly empathizes with their daily trials and can offer, without condescension, advice born of practical experience and tempered with the wisdom of hindsight.

Weixler could have offered that. Now, thanks to one horrible mistake, that’s never going to happen, and that’s a pity not only for him, but for the teens whose lives he could have affected for the better.

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the knee-jerk reaction of a community dealing with high-profile teen stupidity.

I’m going to assume you don’t live in a cave and have heard about the six Falmouth teens (ages 12 to 14) who got nailed passing around via their cell phones a picture of a naked 13-year-old girl — the girlfriend of one of the boys, FYI. For this foray into the growing epidemic of “sexting,” the practice of passing along X-rated images via handheld electronic devices, they’re now facing child porn charges, expulsion from school, and no small amount of public ridicule.

I’ve been perusing the comment sections of various on-line news sources, and everyone has already broken into their two factions: the people who want to see the boys nailed to a wall, perhaps literally; and those who are extolling the theory that boys will be boys and everyone is overreacting.

The child porn charges may seem extreme, but allow me to interject a little realism on this point: it is standard procedure to (to coin a phrase) over-charge a culprit at the outset. Law enforcement officers file their charges based on the evidence at hand, and they usually go for the most severe charge that fits the evidence. Were these kids in possession of a nude picture of an underage girl? If the answer is yes, that’s possession of child pornography. Did they pass it around? If so, that’s dissemination of child porn.

It is not until this case starts wending its way through the courts that the telling details and nuances will be revealed, and chances are the charges will get downgraded to something a little less severe. A child porn charge might not stick once all the circumstances are known, but a lesser charge might.

I’m less concerned with the legal aspects of the case than with the extreme opinions as to these boys’ ultimate fates, and both side are being very unreasonable. Those who are gathering sharp rocks for the public stoning are not allowing themselves to consider the fact that, at a median age of 13, people are in many respects very ignorant. As someone once remarked, it’s a teenager’s job to be stupid. They’re supposed to screw up, frequently, regularly, and sometimes spectacularly. If you’re saying to yourself right now, “I never did anything idiotic as a teenager,” then you are a lying sack…or you grew up chained to a radiator and only recently escaped your captors, which means you’re dealing with a far different set of problems.

(And I wouldn’t be too quick to dump this entirely in the parents’ laps. Having good, attentive, morally grounded parents is not a guarantee that the child will not prove a bad seed, or even goof-proof. It’s a good place to start looking for the deeper causal factors, but no one should be stunned if it’s revealed that the parents did everything right.)

Then there are the rabid defenders of youthful indescretion, those who are trying to find every possible excuse to exonerate these boys. Some are blaming the girl, and who knows? Maybe she did get this sick sad ball rolling by taking a naughty pic of herself and sending it to her boyfriend. This does not excuse that boy from passing the fun along to his mates that they might share a saucy larf, ho-ho.

Many are brushing this episode off on the basis that, as mentioned above, the kids are young and stupid and had no real grasp of what they were doing. Yes, they may lack the deeper understanding of their actions, but they can’t claim complete innocence either. They had some level of awareness.

Remember when Coca-Cola scuttled their product in favor of “New Coke,” then, after people protested the change, switched back to the original formula? The switch back was greeted with a huge spike in sales, and folks speculated the entire thing was a cunning ploy to boost lagging sales and put Coke back on top over its rival Pepsi. A Coke exec, when confronted with this theory, said, “We’re not that smart and we’re not that stupid.”

These kids aren’t smart enough to fully wrap their brains around what they did, but they’re not so oblivious that they’re all sitting at home right now saying, “What did we do? We were just goofing around!”

The people prepping their pitchforks and torches need to back off and let these boys have what will no doubt be (and should be) a very hard learning experience.  The people who want to sweep this all under the rug? Same goes for you. The kids did something wrong, maybe not with malicious intent, but it was still wrong and, yes, illegal. There must be repercussions, if not in the name of punishment, in the name of delivering a much-needed wake-up call.