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?

acolon@nysun.com