Once again, thanks to the Internet, an example of a schoolyard incident that happens thousands of times every day has become something of a worldwide sensation.

People all over the world have made a hero out of Casey Heynes, a 16-year-old Australian schoolboy, and a demon out of 13-year-old Richard Gale, an accused bully who apparently got what was coming to him for picking on the older kid.

The video, of course, is yet another YouTube sensation. It shows Gale, who’s about half of Heynes’ size, taunting the older boy and then punching him in the face and body. Heynes, who apparently has a history of being bullied and had had enough, finally picks up the younger kid and body-slams him – on a concrete walkway. On the surface, it’s a moment to gladden the heart of all of us who endured schoolyard taunts.

People around the world are lauding Heynes as a hero and slamming Gale as the spawn of Satan. Both have been interviewed on Australian TV and those interviews are part of what’s going around the Internet. Heynes seems like a pretty sweet kid. Gale’s defense, of course, is, “he started it.” But he sort of blows it for himself when the interviewer asks him if he regrets what he did; he says no, and then his father, who’s sitting off-camera, apparently directs him to change his answer, which he does. It’s a singularly unconvincing performance. The kid would’ve been better off just keeping his mouth shut and taking his lumps until Heynes’ 15 minutes of fame are up.

Of course, nobody will ever know what actually happened. All we’ve really got is a little more than a half-minute of video (why does everybody tape everything now?) that may or may not give an accurate picture of what happened.

For what it’s worth – I’m speaking out of bald-faced ignorance here, but my reporter’s radar tells me I’m right – I think the story that’s going around the world probably is pretty accurate. Given the kids’ postures and actions , it looks like Gale was certainly the provocateur. Heynes , who’s a pretty big kid, doesn’t look like he’s making any threats toward Gale. Gale is dancing around like some sort of scrawny Muhammad Ali, obviously showing off for his buddies, and he lands a couple of pretty good shots on Heynes before the older kid reacts at all. The accused bully is just lucky he didn’t get hurt worse, because it was a pretty good body-slam.

As I said, though, we’ll never know. Maybe Heynes is some sort of monster and maybe Gale is a poor, picked-on kid himself (he claims to have been a victim of bullying in the past). Maybe everybody in their school trembles in fear as the older kid lumbers down the hall.

I’m not sure, though, why Heynes has become a worldwide hero. There’s something a little off about the reaction. Yeah, he fought back. Yeah, he (maybe) gave a bully a taste of his own medicine, which may have been a long time coming. And I’m not saying that poor little Richard Gale deserves our pity because the little dear is misunderstood and has had a tough life and just needs a big ol’ hug. From what I’ve seen, the kid looks like a bit of a butt.

I guess Heynes is a hero because he actually did something many of us have wanted to do at one time or another. Sometimes, a hero is somebody who just doesn’t give a damn anymore, who finally decides he doesn’t care about whatever the consequences of fighting back are. (The other side of that, by the way, is, as humorist Marvin Kitman once said, a coward is a hero with a wife, three kids and a mortgage.)

The problem is, what Heynes did is something only a schoolboy can do, really. There are bullies all around us. Sometimes they’re the obnoxious neighbor, sometimes they’re the jerk boss, sometimes they’re the battering spouse. Yeah, it would be nice to body-slam them, but if you do, you can get arrested, fired or killed in retaliation. One of the reasons life is unfair is that in most instances, when you get bullied you have to take it.

Of course, that’s only true up to a point. I once had a boss who was a classic schoolyard bully writ large. The guy was a real crap-sack. I quit that job with no notice (and, to sweeten things a little, when he improperly withheld part of my last paycheck I was able to go through the state and get the money out of him). But here’s the rest of the story: I did that because I already had taken another job; I was going to give my notice in two weeks anyway but he tried to screw me out of some money. And the guy was doing some highly illegal things, so my fallback position was to threaten to turn him in to the labor police if I didn’t get all the money he owed me. Had he been just slightly less of an orifice, and a little smarter, I would’ve had to take when he was dishing out. And he carried a gun, so simply body-slamming him wasn’t a real option.

So I hope young Mr. Heynes enjoys his brief time as hero, and I hope Richard Gale has learned a lesson, at least about picking on kids who are bigger than he is. I can see admiring Casey, because in some ways what he did was one for all of us who ever felt the twisting in our gut when we walked out to the schoolyard.

But maybe if adults learned to stand up to the bully next door or in the office or in the bed next to them, we wouldn’t have to make a hero out of a teen-age boy who, however justifiably, simply lost his temper.