I just want to say that death and war are horrible things and there is nothing wrong with wanting them to end or trying to end them. War is totally horrific.

At the same time, I just think we have this habit as a society of creating a charged label, and then using these charged labels to argue against our political opponents as a way to brand them as illegitimate, dangerous or beyond the bounds of acceptable debate.

Some examples of this is how the terrorism label became a charged label after 9/11 and was used to delegimatize all kinds or protest or political organizing, or how we have expanded the definition of racism beyond overt racism to systemic racism, which many democrats used to label every major republican a racist and casts arguments about policy as a form of personally being a bigot.

By recognizing that people we disagree with are not the second coming of hitler or bin Laden, we make space for constructive debate and real solutions instead of shutting down debate, viewing people we disagree with as pure evil and not addressing the root causes.