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Americans have shown enormous sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. I hope we can also develop empathy.

Sympathy is simultaneously feeling emotions similar to someone else’s. Empathy, often an actor’s tool, is mentally identifying with someone else or even with an object. Actors use it in order to understand the characters they must portray.

Now that we have been bombed - and that’s what the attacks were - we need to employ empathy to understand that the people our forces bomb feel the same way we do. We have seen the grief, the fear and the rage that a bombing produces. We need to understand that people in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and anywhere else experience those exact same emotions when we bomb them. We now know that it’s no fun to be the target of bombs. We must recognize that it is true of everyone else.

The most obscene statement I’ve heard is some character - and I’m sorry I can’t remember who it was - who said the American people will have to be "strong and accept that there is going to be collateral damage." That is precisely the mind-set of a terrorist. "Collateral damage" is the putrid euphemism used to describe the murder of innocent people. It is time to tell our government that collateral damage is not acceptable anymore.

We cannot say, as decent human beings, that 5,000 of our civilians killed are victims of terrorism but the 5,000 of someone else’s civilians we kill are just "collateral damage." Murder is murder. Innocence is innocence. If we deliberately kill people who had nothing to do with the attack on us, then we are terrorists. And, by the way, many people view us as just that.

You might think I’m tilting at windmills, but let’s look at the bloodiest war in American history. When North and South fought, 600,000 Americans died. But you know what? Virtually every one of those 600,000 dead was a soldier. It’s true that Gen. William Sherman burned the cities of Atlanta and Columbia, S.C., but Sherman did not burn the people in those cities. In the 20th century, we burned the people in cities.

The ratio of civilian to military dead, which in the 19th century was virtually nonexistent, was still small in World War I but escalated enormously in World War II. The military deaths in World War II amounted to a small fraction of 55 million people killed.

The answer is simple: strategic bombing. Regardless of what its advocates say, strategic bombing is aimed at civilians. This vicious concept reached its apex with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are designed solely to kill civilians. You don’t need a 10-megaton warhead to blow up a military base or airfield. Its only purpose is to murder civilians. Thank God no one has used that type of weapon since we burned the people in Nagasaki. And, by the way, the reason there were so few Americans killed at Pearl Harbor was because the Japanese pilots took extraordinary care not to attack civilians.

It’s time for us to tell our political and military leaders: enough of this collateral-damage heifer dust. If you’re going to fight terrorists, we expect you to kill terrorists and not innocent people who have nothing to do with terrorism and no control over it. If you’re going to fight another country, we expect you to attack its military, not its civilian population or its civilian infrastructure.

In the past, we viewed bombing other people almost as a sport. "Yeah, go get ’em. Blow ’em all to hell. Let God sort ’em out." Well, now that we know what it’s like to get blown all to hell, I hope we will develop empathy and make it clear to our government that fighting terrorism need not involve becoming a terrorist nation ourselves.