So I'm sitting at the ol' dining room table, my bagel and V-8 breakfast before me, and I pick up the Parade Magazine, which the News & Observer is so kind as to include with its Sunday newspaper.

I always read Parade, mostly for Walter Scott's Personality Parade. I like to see which press agents have made their money each week by getting a mention of their star in that astonishingly bland gossip column.

Anyway, in this week's Parade cover story Elie Wiesel (someone whom I've generally considered reasonable and thoughtful) offers his perspective on the terrorism war. The title of the piece? "To defeat them, first we must understand them."

I didn't read the piece. The title itself is enough for me. In a time when the Prez can refer to a group of nations as "the axis of evil" with impunity and then exhort Americans to spend, spend, spend in an apparent attempt to prove Imelda Marcos political theory (consumerism = patriotism), what we don't need is a seemingly rational person telling us that the terrorists are somehow fundamentally different than we are.

There are people high up in the Bush Administration calling for the use of nuclear weapons ("tactical" nukes, to be sure, but let's not kid ourselves) in the eventuality of an attack on Iraq. There are even more commentators, on news programs that appear on networks not controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who have chimed in saying this isn't such a bad idea. I feel confident in saying that if you ask the average person on the street, he or she would have no problem with "nuking the bastards."

Last I checked, somewhere around 3,000 people died in the three attacks on 9/11. The use of one "tactical" nuclear weapon would almost assuredly kill more people. But forget that word "tactical." Most folks probably wouldn't have a problem with dropping "the big one" on Baghdad. Bush (pere), Clinton and Bush (fils) have all made it their stock and trade to demonize Saddam Hussein, turning a petty warlord into something akin to the antichrist. I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of Americans would support an outright assassination of Hussein and his closest pals, even as they would express utter outrage at the notion that a "terrorist" might target our own Prez.

Yes, there are differences. Saddam Hussein took power by killing off his enemies. George Bush (fils) didn't kill anyone (that I know if, anyway), but he came to power by manipulating public opinion and the Supreme Court--and not by actually winning an election. But let's say he trounced Al Gore by ten million at the polls and by a hundred votes in the Electoral College. That still would not give him the moral authority to assassinate any foreign leader, no matter that leader's legitimacy. If the Prez has a beef with Iraq, he should go to Congress and have war declared.

But I'm forgetting my point. In this country, people who kill Americans are called terrorists. People (I can't say "soldiers," due to the astonishing amount of CIA operatives pulling the trigger) who kill our supposed enemies are called "heroes." Are we really so self-centered as a nation that we cannot imagine another perspective on these events?

I live in a city that celebrates diversity. Durham's white population outnumbers its black population, but not by much. And we've got a hispanic population that's growing by leaps and bounds. A couple years back, Durham was named the No. 3 most gay-friendly city in the nation. Did the mayor gnash his teeth in public and bemoan the lack of moral fiber in our town? Hell no. The mayor (a Republican, by the way) said what just about every public official says. That the people of Durham believe in diversity and tolerance, and we welcome anyone who wants to live here and make this city a better place to live.

On my very short block, there is a house of apartments, a black family, a mixed-race couple, a gay couple, a lesbian woman and two regular white couples with very small kids. We all know each other pretty well, and so our conversations are often spiced with teasing and inside jokes. But the funniest thing of all is how similar we all are. Three of the households have two dogs apiece. All of us have spent a good deal of time fixing up our houses and our yards. And the addition of two infants to the mix has everyone buzzing with excitement. Our lesbian neighbor often comments on how the daughters of her dyke (her word) friends are all girly girls--big fans of pink, lace and all the trimmings, much to the dismay of their mommies--and how she only likes to babysit boys (and so it is a good thing Max is turned out Max and not Anya).

I'm using labels here consciously, because in general I don't. I don't think of Tempie as a dyke, or Scott and Michael as gay guys, or George and Michelle's brood as that black family up the street. The labels aren't wrong; they just present a terribly limited perspective. Every person is so much more than a single descriptive word. And so while I think it is perfectly fair to call the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks "terrorists," let's also not forget that they were people. That Osama bin Laden, for all of his power-hungry manipulation and perpetration of atrocity, is a person. And we are people.

It is much easier to do harm to another person when we reduce him or her to a single label or epithet. Those mobs in India didn't kill people, they killed Muslims and Hindus. The armies in Northern Ireland don't kill people, they kill nationalists and loyalists, Catholics and Protestants. Slobodan Milosevich didn't order the murder of thousands of people, he wrote off thousands of Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars.

As tempting as it is to simply hate the Taliban and the members of al-Qaeda and anyone else who attacks (or even merely speaks out against) our nation, we must strive to do better than that. To be better than those who murder us just because we are "American." We're the biggest, baddest and, yes, best nation on this planet. Of all peoples, we don't need to use labels to dehumanize our rather pathetic enemies. We have the strength to see them for what they really are.

People. Just like us.

Jon Worley has been building this soapbox for a few weeks now