...[T]he United States is becoming increasingly alone in the world. American leaders constantly claim to be speaking on behalf of "the international community." But whom do they have in mind? China? Russia? India? Pakistan? Iran? The Arab world? The Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Africa? Latin America? France? Do any of these countries or regions see the United States as the spokesman for a community of which they are a part?

On issue after issue, the United States has found itself increasingly alone, with one or a few partners, opposing most of the rest of the world's states and peoples. These issues include U.N. dues; sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Libya; the land mines treaty; global warming; an international war crimes tribunal; the Middle East; the use of force against Iraq and Yugoslavia; and the targeting of 35 countries with new economic sanctions between 1993 and 1996. On these and other issues, much of the international community is on one side and the United States is on the other. The circle of governments who see their interests coinciding with American interests is shrinking…

While the United States regularly denounces various countries as "rogue states," in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower…promoting its own particular interests with little reference to those of others. The United States is unlikely to become an isolationist country, withdrawing from the world. But it could become an isolated country, out of step with much of the world. ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Loneliness of the Lone Ranger
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 28, 2001

This is a strange and unsettling time to be a political progressive and an advocate for peace. The attack against our people and our homeland has evoked in many of us a level of passionate solidarity with one another that we haven't felt before, at least in my generation. I came of age with Vietnam and Watergate, and in the same way that those events created seismic shifts in our nation, they shifted the meaning of our national symbol. But after September 11, the American flag suddenly didn't feel quite so complex and laden; it just stood for the country, for the people of the country, for our grief and our collective will to rise above that grief. Those of us who have long mistrusted or actively opposed our country's military adventures could join in flying the flag: not as a sign of support for bombs or guns or even for the government, but simply as a sign of support for each other. We also found ourselves uncertain about things we were once very sure about, like military intervention. How should we respond to people willing to visit so mind-numbing a violence on so many others?

One of the sure signs that our democracy is alive and well is the level of engagement with that question, the level of earnest struggle in mind and heart. On the edges of the conversation, protesters may trot out the familiar and provocative tactics, and on the other side we are scolded or even punished for disagreement or dissent, as though the collective wisdom, and with it our freedoms, should be stifled in times of war. I have a feeling that most of us are pretty sure that we don't stand fully in either of those camps. Most of us have an urgent sense that it's time, that it's past time, to set aside those old divisions. We have not been in this place before. We cannot use the lenses, the ideologies, the habits we have used before. If we're going to rise to what is called for in this moment, we need to set aside our patterns of reaction and look as cleanly and as clearly as we know how at the truths that confront us today.

The playwright Tony Kushner wrote more than a decade ago: ‘There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they’re living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the bad, or some mixture of the two.’ If he's right that such moments can occur in history, then we're living in one of them now. We're living together through a turning point where a great deal that we can't even see yet is gathered and poised, and what we choose to do as a people will help determine what direction we will all tumble toward next.

I chose my title and planned this sermon several months ago, back when I thought we faced an ordinary year of Sundays. I was driven by outrage at all the international treaties our government was suddenly willing to abandon. Some of them concerned truly earth-shaking issues, like global warming and nuclear disarmament. One of the painful ironies in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks was watching our government turn to the same nations it had so recently snubbed in international circles, to rally their support and sympathy for our plight and our desire to respond.

Few nations turned us down outright; the attack was too horrific, the violation of international norms too blatant. But it was only a matter of days before voices began to sound out from the international community, offering not only sympathy but also warnings and pleas. "Don't let your response be out of proportion to the offense. Don't call it a war when it doesn't involve a sovereign nation. Don't make the mistakes others have made in Afghanistan. Don't believe your own rhetoric: this is not as simple as good against evil. What you do will yield consequences that will fall on everyone in this complex world in which we all live."

. . .

I haven't seen any reruns of the old TV show 'The Lone Ranger' in my adult years, so all that I can conjure up comes up from childhood memories. I remember that the Lone Ranger always rode with his faithful sidekick, Tonto, and that although they seemed quite friendly, it was always crystal clear who was the leader and who was the follower. I remember that the Lone Ranger always knew who the good guys were and where the bad guys hung out, and that he always managed to arrive just in the nick of time. He used violence only when it was absolutely necessary, and usually got the bad guys wrapped up and carted away without killing anyone. He always saved the girl, or the farm, or the cattle or the pioneers, but never for his own ends; he did it just because it was right, and then, modestly refusing any thanks or even acknowledgement, he rode off into the sunset as someone inevitably asked, 'Who was that masked man?'

The Lone Ranger was just a character in a long-outdated TV show. And yet it frightens me to realize how many parallels I can find between that fictional character and the way our country behaves in the international community. We act, and often speak, as though other nations were our sidekicks or followers, with nothing to offer us but their admiration. We seem to believe that we always see clearly where the good guys end and the bad guys begin. We think we know how to deal with the bad guys, no matter what anyone else might urge us to consider. We are never the bad guys, no matter what suffering might come from our actions. We seem to believe that in our hands, military force is benign and disinterested, that we do it not for selfish ends but simply because it's right. We ride off into the sunset and rarely look back to find out what happens next -- what really unfolds in the wake of our action as the dust finally settles.

A few years ago Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke in the Lone Ranger voice when she said, "The United States is the indispensable nation…[because] we stand tall, and therefore see further than other nations." Other nations might be forgiven for feeling a certain twinge of resentment at statements like this one, which cast all the rest as 'dispensible', putting them in the role of Tonto at best, or entirely off stage from our drama.

It was therefore shocking, at a time when we needed friends in the world as never before, to hear again the voice of the Lone Ranger in the rhetoric that described our plight. We were told that this is a war of good against evil and that good will prevail; that it's a war of civilization against the barbarians; that the nations of the world must choose whether they're with us or against us, though we had not yet told them anything about what we intended to do. We named our actions a 'crusade' and initially titled it 'Operation Infinite Justice'. Neither this language nor the behavior it evokes can possibly guide us along the complex and hazardous path we're called to walk right now. What it has lead us to so far is akin to the attempt to kill a hornet swarm with a submachine gun.

We need to recognize the truth, and tell the truth, about our bombing campaign in Afghanistan. The truth is that even before we arrived with our planes and our smart bombs, there was almost nothing left in that devastated country to use as a target. Although our government keeps telling us that this will be a very different kind of war, we seem to know how to use only the conventional tools of war, higher and higher fire power. After weeks of bombing in which our top-of-the-line smart bombs have been dropped on the same Red Cross relief station twice, it's time to stop what should never have started.

Fighting terrorists is like fighting ghosts: bombs are not only useless, but are bound to create more of them. Like ghosts, terrorists are never where we seem to be aiming; they come out of the walls and floors we thought were solid; they seem to vanish into thin air only to reappear when we least expect it. And like ghosts, terrorists are 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.

. . .

If we are willing to speak with a new honesty, we will tell one another a hard truth much of the rest of the world has known for a long time. It's a truth known even by some within our own borders, those who live in the inner city war zones. The truth is, 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 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 bills. And we will not become safe through bombing Afghanistan, even if we do it from now until doomsday which, by the way, we will probably hasten.

But there are things we can do to become safer. And right at the top of the list is the choice to relinquish our lovely fictions about being the world's Lone Ranger. The world is much too small, much too intertwined and vulnerable, for us to tell ourselves this story any longer. We are the most powerful nation in the world, when it comes to economic and military strength. No one in the world disputes that strength. But in our collective national soul of souls, we have never believed that we should lead other nations merely because we're the strongest. That's 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.

This kind of wisdom, this kind of goodness, are not born from acting in the world as though we shared it with no one else. They are born from our recognition that the people of each nation are so intimately linked to one another that nothing we do has consequences only within our borders. That intimacy calls us toward a democracy we've been reluctant to practice outside our borders, however jealously we've guarded it within them.

In the book, Wilson's Ghost, Robert McNamara and James Blight write, "We are not practicing in an international context what we preach…-- which is democratic decision-making. We are not omniscient. We say that we believe that better decisions result from a process that [involves]… all the affected parties, but [we are] hypocritical. Often we proceed without seeking, or listening to, advice from those with common values and common objectives. If we cannot convince them of the merit of our proposed action, we should question the wisdom of our decision."

Surely in today's world this is the commonest of common sense! We may never rise above the habit of viewing our nation as the best, our way the most enlightened, our people the most advanced, but many nations carry their own version of this hubris. Met by the steadying truths of other nations, it won't cause so much harm. But we have to practice the wisdom the world now teaches, that this one small and fragile home requires a commitment that transcends the national boundaries and interests. There is no sunset for our Lone Ranger to ride off into; we're all on-stage, and it belongs to us all.

Real multilateralism is nothing like the reluctant coalitions we force together to support us in what we've clearly already decided to do. It means the willingness to let our voice be only one of the voices raised, only one of the voices heeded, in choosing how a problem should be solved. It means the willingness to strengthen institutions like the United Nations and the World Court and to infuse them with the authority and trust and resources they need to act on behalf of the larger good. It's easy to feel cynicism and doubt toward today's United Nations; its spectacular failures to save lives in Bosnia and in Rwanda do not inspire unwavering confidence. But the U.N. is operating on a charter and decision-making structure fifty years old, born in a world vastly different from the one we face today. It has been hamstrung and handicapped in a multitude of ways, some of them caused by our country's choices.

. . .

The United Nations is an experiment worth making anew, because the alternative is unthinkable. We have just closed out the bloodiest century in human history, and we have walked into a new one with enough firepower and enough simmering hatreds to make our nightmares look benign. As a Carnegie Commission report put it, "If we cannot learn to accommodate each other respectfully in the twenty-first century, we could destroy each other at such a rate that humanity will have little to cherish."

Letting go of the Lone Ranger and behaving as though we know we share this planet, will go some distance toward making us safer, because it will bring forward the collective wisdom and help us see past our pain or grief or reactivity. One part of the collective wisdom, for instance, has been urgently trying 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 become stronger 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. Quite a number of our allies are already trying to point out to us some obvious better ideas than bombing an already devastated land. The United Nations estimates that well over seven million Afghans who have fled the Taliban or our bombing are in immediate danger of death by starvation and exposure. Seven million people, seven million beating hearts, each singular, frightened one of them connected to us by what we do or fail to do.

What might be the outcome 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 people? 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 would rather be. And if we did it well, surely we would see the ghosts begin to wither: it is hard to demonize those who save the life of your child.

And for the sake of our souls, we could probably bear just a little more truth about Afghanistan. It's one of the places in which we did the classic ride off into the sunset, having nurtured, trained, funded and armed Osama bin Laden and thousands of others, in the name of combating the old Soviet Union. When that goal was won, off we went, leaving behind murderous chaos in a war-ravaged nation, a place ripe for bitterness and despair. This isn't an unpatriotic piece of propaganda: it's the historic truth. We need to name this truth and do all we can to understand it, or we'll be trapped in a repetition almost too farcical to believe its tragedy.

So we begin by waving goodby to the Lone Ranger, and moving our halting tongues toward telling the truth. If our leaders believe their own words when they tell us we are fighting a different kind of war this time, they will begin with these two simple and profound steps, because they are the first ones on a path that has some chance of making the ghosts of terrorism fade away. Despair and bitterness are terrorism's food, and as long as we're willing to create more despair and bitterness with our money and our military might, we will find ourselves haunted in ways that are likely to be, quite simply, unbearable.

More than two centuries ago, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote words we should recall by way of guidance today: "Let me say one word more of the soul of the nation and of the importance of keeping it sensitive and responsive to the claims of truth, justice, liberty, and progress. … It is the soul that makes a nation great or small, noble or ignoble, weak or strong. It is the soul that exalts it to happiness, or sinks it to misery… Fire cannot burn it, water cannot quench it…It is just as real as granite or iron…The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous; for upon these conditions depend the life of its life." AMEN.