Will Thursday's tragic events at Fort Hood, Texas spur a reactionary backlash of hatred and xenophobia like those eight years ago in New York and Washington did? Or will their relative smallness, and isolation from the diabolical cell-executed mass murder at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, allow our violated nation to treat the killing of 12 soldiers and a civilian as the senseless act of violence it appears to be?

America has seen too many acts of the kind carried out Thursday by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan: Only a day later, a fired employee in Orlando, Fla., opened fire on fellow workers, killing at least one and wounding several others. And three days from now, we'll be starkly reminded of the "Beltway sniper" panic of 2002 when John Allen Muhammad is executed by the state of Virginia for the murder of one of his 10 victims.

Military authorities will have hell's own time explaining how Hasan, a psychiatrist too late seen as a menace, went untreated and largely undetected, let alone armed with civilian pistols at the fort's center for battleground-bound and -returning soldiers.

As for what they do to keep another such incident from occurring, will prevention be case by case, with a focus on wartime mental syndromes — or will ethnic and religious profiling enter the picture? How many mainstream American Muslims will pay unjust prices for the acts of one deranged man?

As a military wife told a reporter, she wished the accused killer's name was Smith. But the days of Smiths' and Joneses' predominance in the population are long past. We're a diverse nation — and better for it.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, rashes of vigilantism and vengeance broke out — sometimes against anyone even thought by their ignoramus assailants to be Muslim. But while Hasam is reported to have complained of abuse, most American Muslims have weathered the storms, which calmed when our country did. Whatever the major's demons, his many fellow Muslims in our armed forces are serving honorably — and with little prejudicial behavior toward them. That, given the high testosterone levels and xenophobic tendencies among some of our troops, says a lot for the comparative tolerance that makes America the beacon it is, welcoming so much of the world.

Let that spirit prevail as our nation's leaders pick up the pieces of this terrible occurrence.