Talk about making it hard to pick the right topic to chat about this week.

I mean, it's bad enough that the greatest television show of all time, "Battlestar Galactica," is coming to an end tonight. But the network that aired it, SciFi Channel, had to go about and change its name to a word I created more than a decade ago.

So what do I talk about? How about neither.

Instead, I think something worth noting as we prepare for the final hours of "Battlestar Galactica" is something series star Edward James Olmos brought up during a visit to the United Nations earlier this week. Olmos, who has always stood up for various causes and is willing to even get arrested for them, used the soapbox he was handed at the U.N. to talk about something that is very near and dear to his heart: race relations.

"There's no such thing as if there was a Latino race, an Asian race, an indigenous race," Olmos said at the event, according to The Los Angeles Times. "There never has been a Latino race and there never will be. There's only one race and that's the human race. Over 600 years ago, the caucasian race decided to use [race] as a cultural determiner to kill another culture ... there is but one race."

I think those are very powerful words, and there's no better place to speak them then on the floor of the U.N. And I have to fully agree with Olmos ... we spend so much time trying to box each other with labels and such, we tend to forget who we are, and what we all mean to each other.

And I don't just mean the boxes we place on us like black, white, Asian, gay. There are other boxes we tend to also put each other in. And we've seen a lot of that this week when fans expressed a lot of anger toward the new "Syfy" name for the SciFi Channel.

It's hard as fandom to sometimes sit back and let things happen, and we shouldn't. In fact, Leonard Nimoy told me something very close to that on the phone yesterday when he learned that the small town of Vulcan, Alberta -- filled with Star Trek fans and such -- were just going to accept that they couldn't host the premiere of "Star Trek XI" there. Sometimes, you have to admit defeat, but too many times we roll over, and that can't be the case.

But when we decide to stand our ground, it becomes Us vs. Them. The Them are the enemy we have to destroy at all costs, and no matter through what means, to the point that we forget they are humans on the other side.

I have defended NBC Universal's decision to change SciFi Channel's name to "Syfy," not because I think it's the greatest move they ever made. Far from it. But I do understand where they are coming from, and I have a bit of a bias of my own. I mean, whether they want to admit it or not, we all know who created the name (ahem, me), and I want to see it succeed, whether I have control of the name or not.

But even if I didn't hold that position, I don't think the best course of action would be for me to attack Dave Howe and Bonnie Hammer. At least not personally.

That's what it comes down to, however. Us vs. Them. Let's dehumanize Them so that we can go in with both barrels blasting and throwing every grenade we can muster.

But you know, that's exactly the same mentality that is used when we box groups of people by race or whatever other means we choose. By pointing out someone is black, Asian, Latino or what-not, we turn them into an object, and away from being a human being. And when we do that, it's easier for us to treat them as non-humans, and forget that they are people with emotions, feelings, cares, loves, disgusts -- everything we have.

Few of us will ever be in a position where we decide the fates of large masses of people, but that doesn't mean we can't practice exactly what Olmos was talking about at the U.N. in our every day lives. We can stop boxing people in an effort to dehumanize them, and realize that the best way to disagree with someone's decisions and actions is to express disagreement with someone's decisions and actions. There is no need to go after someone personally, no matter how angry or frustrated we are.

I'm not saying that you should add Howe and Hammer to your Christmas card list, but there's no reason to not treat them like you would want to be treated. Because after all, we are just one human race.

So say we all.