Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

The big boy's face was one that Jake had seen before.  It was the face of a kid who would think it the height of hilarity to douse a cat's tail with lighter fluid or feed a bread ball with a fishhook planted in the middle to a hungry dog. The sort of kid who sat in the back of the room and snapped bra straps...and then said, "Who, me?" with a big, dumb look of surprise on his face once someone finally complained.  There weren't many kids like him at Piper but there were a few.  Jake supposed there were a few in every school.  They dressed better at Piper but the face was the same.          --Stephen King, from The Waste Lands

I'm currently rereading Stephen King's fantasy series The Dark Tower, and just came across the above lines in the third book The Waste Lands.  When it got to "Jake supposed there were a few in every school" I thought, yes, that's true...only there were more than a few from the school I attended in south Florida.  And my own bus stop seemed to hold an extremely high concentration of them, commonly referred to as "bullies".  When I was growing up through the 7th through 12th grades there was a nastiness of behavior among many of my peers that I have not seen remotely matched ever since I left this school.  In King's story, he was referring to one individual, namely pivotal character Eddie Dean's bullying and disturbed big brother Harry.  On the screen bullies are also often depicted as loners feared and scorned by the majority of "normal" kids around them.  But where I came from it was the bullies who were the stars of the show, and not only did other kids rush to adore and suck up to them...even collaborating in their persecution of whichever targeted victim was the focus of attention...but the teachers themselves either turned a blind eye to this behavior or held the aggressors in high regard.  One of the traits that bullies have is that, when confronted, they often claim that they were just "kidding around" and "can't you take a joke".  And there has been a kind of ethos perpetuated among both kids and adults that in bully/victim confrontations, it's always the responsibility of the victim to stand up for his or her self alone...as if this is a necessary rite of growing up (see the Andy Griffith episode about Opie's bully).  Stephen King has written a lot about bullies, and it's one of the many things I like about him...they stand out in the stories It and the The Body.  King also brought up an important detail about standing up to them: sometimes they're armed, and in today's world that is becoming more and more of a likelihood...try "standing up" to that.  I've seen celebrities long grown-up fondly look back on their childhood years and claim that they were bullies, laughing it all off as good-natured fun...Bill O'Reilly comes to mind in this regard.  The question I have is whether bullies in childhood, even after many years of being adults, are constitutionally capable of recognizing the hurt to others from their past behavior and have truly transformed themselves into more compassionate, empathetic human beings...from what I've seen so far with some of my old classmates I've yet to see this happen...