I wonder how many Americans, as they gathered around the Thanksgiving table, remembered to be thankful that their Congress had passed the sweeping Homeland Security Act of 2002? And I also wonder how many anti-American terrorists, gathered around their bomb-making equipment on that same day, were cringing in fear of being foiled by the powerful new government agency that the legislation promises to bring into existence?

My guess is that the answer to both of those questions is – not many.

Probably very few of us, whether we’re ordinary Americans or mad bombers in training, are confident that the freshly christened Department of Homeland Security will actually make the homeland any safer and not prove to be just another huge, inefficient, pain-in-the-wallet bureaucratic agency.

But President Bush is exuding confidence that the new Cabinet-level department, the creation of which he initially opposed when Democrats suggested the idea soon after Sept. 11 but later flogged as a flagship Republican issue in the 2002 midterm elections, will be given the tools it needs to succeed.

Chief among those tools is the unique authority that has been invested in the president to hire and fire members of the department at his discretion, a provision that was virulently opposed by organized labor. But this is not a good time to oppose anything the president wants to do to combat terrorism, and the act was passed by a lame duck Congress with barely token opposition.

Nor is there likely to be any organized resistance to the president’s choice to head up the new department, despite the fact that Tom Ridge is thought by many to have been largely ineffectual in his recent post as a Cabinet-level adviser on the domestic terrorism issue.

In fact, Ridge’s only tangible accomplishment during his year’s service as homeland security adviser seems to have been the creation of a color-coded warning system meant to identify the current level of terrorist threat in a simple, direct manner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t simple enough for many of us, and at the moment I couldn’t even tell you which colors represented which threat level (though I am pretty sure that red is bad – red is always bad.)

Most of us are probably similarly confused about what this new Department of Homeland Security is all about and how its creation is supposed to make America safer. In short, the new department will combine a number of existing agencies that play a part in homeland security (including the INS, the Coast Guard, and Customs) into a single umbrella organization that will report directly to the president. The idea is to eliminate the interagency miscommunication and non-cooperation that may have contributed to our lack of preparedness for terrorist attacks in the past.

Will it help? Perhaps, but even Ridge concedes that optimal performance by the new agency will not make America completely safe. “We can’t guarantee a fail-safe system,” Ridge said recently. “We have to be right a thousand times a day forever. They have to be right every once in a while.”

All we can do is our best, in other words, and the rest is up to God, or fate, or whatever power you believe controls our destiny. But isn’t that true of life in general?

I wish Mr. Ridge well in his new position, and I hope the new agency is all it’s cracked up to be. But I don’t think any government agency is ever going to make me feel truly secure in my homeland again. Only a time machine could do that.

– Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Warner Robins (Ga.) Daily Sun.