My Staten Island neighborhood, Tappen Park, has been the
meeting site of anti-war political rallies. This past summer,
organizers provided refreshments and entertainment to liven up
the sparsely attended events. These rallies reminded me of the
title of an old movie, "What Did You Do in the War,
Daddy?" The progeny of the protesters would likely hear this
response: "I did everything I could to bash our country and
loathe the military."
Last Friday, as I passed the park's gazebo, I noticed two
individuals seated at a table while a third stood nearby, sipping
something from a cardboard container. A large banner that read
"Food not Bombs" was draped from the columns of the
gazebo, but no one else seemed interested in partaking of the
free sustenance. This city has an obesity problem, and I have yet
to see any emaciated indigents in this borough who are suffering
because of the war in Iraq. Part of me feels sympathy for these
misguided true believers, but another part is cynical enough to
recognize that their motivation is inspired less by altruism than
by anti-government paranoia and the Bush derangement syndrome.
Deep thinkers need not apply for admittance to the left side of
the political spectrum. Demagogues rely on this, and depend on
emotion to carry their arguments. The woman who tried to
assassinate President Ford, Sara Jane Moore, was recently
released from prison and said she had been under the delusion
that the government had declared war on the left. In an interview
with KGO-TV, she said: "I was functioning, I think, purely
on adrenaline and not thinking clearly. I have often said that I
had put blinders on and I was only listening to what I wanted to
hear."
The few times I have actually attempted to have a face-to-face
debate with true believers on the left, I've come away stymied by
their repetition of programmed rhetorical sound bites sprung from
an irrational mantra. When they are asked how they would have
handled the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their eyes
glaze over as they search in vain for an appropriate but
nonexistent response. The younger ones seem quite content with
fending off my arguments with nonsensical blather, but my senior
combatants are more likely to end the debate with, "I can't
argue with you."
Needless to say, this deep divide of our political stances was
born on Election Day 2000 with the alleged theft of the
presidency, according to the Kool-Aid brigade, which is as
slavishly devoted to liberal icons such as Noam Chomsky as were
the Jim Jones disciples to their leader.
A former liberal turned conservative comedian, Evan Sayet, also
puzzled over whether those on the left side of issues were evil
or stupid, and he came to the conclusion that they were instead
suspended in a childhood frame of mind. In a speech at the
Heritage Foundation last year, Mr. Sayet said: "So what
you're left with after 10, 12, 14, 20 years in the leftist
indoctrination centers that our schools have become are citizens
of voting age who are utterly unwilling and incapable of
critically judging the merits of the positions they hold and have
held unquestioned since they were 5 years old and first entered
the leftist indoctrination process."
He went on to cite the book that identified this mind-set:
"It was Robert Fulghum's 'All I Really Need to Know I
Learned in Kindergarten,' and it reads like the bible of modern
liberalism and the playbook of Democratic Party policy. The
sentence fragment 'Don't hit,' which is one of the lessons that
Fulghum refers to, has morphed into an entire sentence now that
they're adults: 'War is not the answer.'"
But thanks to the Internet, this time our military is getting the
respect it richly deserves. There's no Walter Cronkite on the air
distorting our victories as defeats, as he did in 1968, when he
called the Tet offensive a victory for the North Vietnamese army,
when it was a defeat. There's no Dan Rather pushing fake
documents to influence an election. Thanks to bloggers,
innumerable groups are organizing care packages for those serving
abroad. There's also professional help available when soldiers
come home to a grateful nation.
The Soldier's Project of New York and New Jersey (212-242-3784)
offers free psychological counseling in private offices, with no
red tape, a flexible schedule, and no limit to the number of
sessions to returning members of the military and their families.
These volunteers will have no problem answering what they did in
the war. Will you?