The Lone Ranger was just a character in a long-outdated TV show. And yet there are parallels between that fictional character and our own country's behavior in the international community. We speak and act as though other nations were our sidekicks or followers, with nothing to offer us but their admiration. We seem sure of where the line divides the good guys from the bad guys, and we think we know how to deal with the bad guys, no matter what anyone else might say. We ourselves are never the bad guys, no matter what suffering might come from our actions. We ride off into the sunset and rarely look back to find out how the story ends, as the dust from our action finally settles.

At a time when we need friends in the world as never before, it has been shocking to hear again the voice of the Lone Ranger, instructing the other countries of the world that they are either with us or against us. Despite warnings and pleas from nations with far more knowledge of the religious and political realities, we have gone into Afghanistan in what appears to be the only way we know how: something akin to trying to kill a hornet swarm with a submachine gun.

We need to tell the truth about our bombing campaign in Afghanistan. There is nothing left in that devastated country to use as a target for our enormous weapons. Our top-of-the-line smart bombs have been dropped on the same Red Cross relief station twice, and each day brings the wretched news of children, women and noncombatant men killed.

Fighting terrorists is like fighting ghosts: they are never where we are aiming; they seem to come out of the walls and floors we had believed were solid, and they slip away only to reappear when we least expect it. And like ghosts, terrorists can be born of the dead. In the unlikely event that we actually kill Osama bin Laden, he is likely to prove more powerful an inspiration dead than he has been alive.

Here is a hard truth most of the rest of the world has known for a long time: there is no absolute safety. There is no way to be sure, finally and forever, that someone will not do us harm. We will not become safe if we sanction racial profiling or throw out of our country everyone who comes from the Middle East. We will not become safe by whittling away at our civil liberties, increasing police powers and quietly stifling doubt and dissent. We certainly won't become safe through the blatant corporate give-aways being arranged right now as slippery, cynical attachments to new defense spending. And we will not become safe by bombing Afghanistan.

But there are things we can do to become safer. Right at the top of the list is the choice to relinquish our lovely fictions about being the world's Lone Ranger. There is nothing we can do that has consequences only for ourselves; we share a very small stage, and there is no sunset into which the Lone Ranger can ride. The intimacy brought about by our permeable borders and merged economies calls us toward a democracy we've been reluctant to practice outside our borders, however jealously we've guarded it within them. Democracy listens intently to the voices of all concerned, in order to discern the wise course of action through the collective wisdom.

The current collective wisdom has been trying urgently to tell us that Osama bin Laden is more important as an idea than he is as a person. As an idea, he will live and multiply if we do precisely what we are doing right now. At other times in our history, we have understood the wisdom of combating a bad or destructive idea with a better one, and there are some better ideas out there than bombing an already devastated land. The United Nations estimates that well over seven million Afghan refugees are now in danger of death by starvation and exposure. Seven million beating hearts, each singular, frightened one of them connected to us by what we do or fail to do.

What might happen in the seething refugee camps and angry cities of Pakistan if we immediately stopped the bombing and poured our efforts into food and shelter for these seven million souls? Maybe the ghosts of terrorism would begin to starve, as we, their putative enemy, fed the living while it was still possible, clothed the naked, gave shelter and care to the sick. At the very least we would know we were acting out of the soul of our soul, living up to who we believe ourselves to be. And if we did it well, surely we would see the ranks of the terrorists begin to dwindle: it is hard to demonize those who save the life of your child.

We are the most powerful nation in the world, economically and militarily. No nation in the world disputes that strength. But in our national soul of souls, we have never believed that we should lead other nations merely because we're the strongest; that is the leadership of the bully and the despot. Power does not equal authority, and what we really yearn for is authority: the leadership that is born of wisdom under fire and goodness that sees beyond our own self-interest. Such wisdom and goodness are born from acting in the world as though we know we share it with everyone else.

Rev. Kathleen McTigue is Senior Minister to the Unitarian Society of New Haven in Hamden, CT

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