Dear Mr. President, U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, U.S Reps. Tom Allen and Michael Michaud: One of my daughters has been living in London. That would be the city and country where they just arrested all of those guys who wanted to blow up planes flying to America. Those would be planes she has used to fly home.

I’m a real nervous dad now because I don’t think my daughters are any safer today than the day after those bastards flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (that would be the Pentagon my other daughter lives near). In fact, my Nervous Dad Meter is even more red-lined than it was on 9/12/01, because I think they are even less safe now than they were back then.

Why the heck should that be, Mr. President, senators and congressmen? In the days since 9/11/01 we have invaded two countries, made it harder to get on a plane than for a cat with a hot dog tied to its tail to run unscathed through a pit bull convention, and spent many billions supposedly securing this country against Osama and his “bound-for-eternal-glory” boys. We have monitored cell phone calls, chewed up and spit out some of our civil liberties, driven over the Geneva Convention in our homeland security Hummer and lost a lot of soldiers. We ought to be safer for all of that, especially for the profound sacrifice of those soldiers and their families, but it just doesn’t feel as though we really are.

The recent success of British security services in preventing another airline bombing ought to reassure me because it says the system works, but I’m not reassured. Rather, the news suggests part of our problem; with so many plotters out there hidden among people we live with it is only a matter of time before another gets through our porous shields.

If we really want security for our country and my daughters we have a lot more work to do. Now, I’m just a country doctor, so I may have this more wrong than the time I tried to lead a moose to the neighbor’s barn thinking it was his wandering horse (hey, it was a little dark and it was my first moose!), but I have a few suggestions on how to make us safer.

First, let’s stop making only the easy decisions of holding people without trial, monitoring cell phones, taking away perfumes at the airport and shuffling federal agencies. Let’s make real sacrifices and compromises, as our parents did during their war of the 1940s.

For example, experts say we have not taken the tough steps really necessary to make air travel as safe as it can be. We still allow people to carry enough luggage onto the plane with them to stock a small house, when, given the sophistication of potential bombs, we should not be allowing them to carry on much of anything. We do relatively little to screen airline service industry staff that puts tons of supplies on airplanes, or those tons of supplies, because it would slow down flights and cost lots of money.

If we want airline safety from terrorists we need airline security like the Israelis have, the Israelis who have not had a plane hijacked in 35 years. Real security in the air would be inconvenient and expensive, but my daughter is at stake here; what’s inconvenience compared to her safety? I think if you and our other leaders explained to us what it really takes to fly securely we would suck it up and stand in line without our iPods or too much whining.

Second, we have to stop ticking off the entire world, especially the Moslem world. It only takes a tiny, evil, bomb-happy percentage of a billion angry people to be a world-wide threat we can never stamp out, so we have to address the issues fueling that anger. The solutions will probably have to involve a state for the Palestinians, needing less oil from countries that step on the necks of their populations while we kiss their oil assets, and lots more.

Third, we need to be a country that acts in a manner consistent with the values we espouse. We cannot torture terrorism suspects and stand for what is right in the world. We cannot oppose terrorism but remain silent while our ally Israel bombs civilian neighborhoods in a large Arab city, even if Hezbollah lives there and is lobbing rockets at Israel. Is it OK to bomb civilians or is it not? We cannot stand for freedom and then prop up dictatorial regimes because they have a lot of oil. We cannot be a great country if we are too arrogant to care whether just about every other country in the world wants to throw us off Survivor Island.

That is the short list, folks, with the most important thing being to start doing the really tough stuff and stop with the homeland security smoke and mirrors. As you know, the complete list is much longer, but lead us to it – please – and stop betting we will not put up with hardship. We don’t have another choice if we want to be safer than we were 9/10/01, which was obviously not safe at all. We cannot invade every country, hunt down every Osama, and the base at Guantanamo is not big enough to hold all of our enemies. And my Nervous Dad Meter cannot go any higher.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.