Last Saturday, October 26, 2002, a bus, chartered in Pennsylvania by Whitehall Township's Muslim Association of the Lehigh Valley (MALV), transported two dozen or so of its congregation, me, my wife, and members of LEPOCO, the Lehigh Valley peace organization, to our country's capital on the Potomac, a scant three-and-a-half hours away.

For this transplanted Alabama-born native, however, it was a two-and-a-half-hour plane ride from Huntsville, Alabama, and his Army-employer Redstone Arsenal, 30 years ago, to protest another megalomaniac occupant of the White House, Richard Milhouse Nixon "I'm not a crook, won't you buy a used car from me?" Nixon, and his resident Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz wrapped up into one neat package of nihilistic-napalm bomb, Zionist Henry Kissinger.

Back then it was a few days respite from the Montgomery, Alabama, frying pan of Governor George C. Wallace, the police dogs and fire hoses and billyclubs of Birmingham's Police Chief William "Bull" Connor, and the bodies of African-American girls, blown up while attending a Baptist church by homegrown terrorists in Alabama's hard-scrabble Iron City.

Transported back 30 years to Georgia-born and Alabama crucibled Martin Luther King, Jr., and the aching feet, and heart (though un-weakened) of Rosa Parks. King and his lieutenant Dr. Ralph Abernathy spent many hours locked up together in Alabama jails. Transported back to the haunting words of Abernathy, "What this country [America} believes in is 'welfare for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.'"

Which brings me back to last Saturday and the thousands of held-high signs eulogizing Paul Wellstone, who until the tragic morning of that very same day, still carried on the refrain of Dr. Abernathy, that the country's war against poverty, infant mortality, environmental degradation (He stopped pillagers like Enron and Halliburton from raping Alaska's National Wildlife Area, ANWAR), and mental illness.

Wellstone knew, as do millions of Americans, that political liberalism is not the scourge of society that the exterminator Tom Delay of Bush's Texas would have the world believe. Liberals gave millions of Americans, disheartened by the economy of Herbert Hoover, Social Security, which even the most arch conservatives would never surrender, at least entirely, though the blind Bush would still have the country's workers vest at least some of their retirement in a risky stock market. (Many signs at last Saturday's rally warned of Bush's "Wag the Dog" syndrome.

It's a socioeconomic sickness that the millions of American workers inflicted with it call PTSD, Post-Traumatic Syndrome Disorder. For any interested in seeing clinical PTSD, visit any Veterans Administration hospital; e.g., the VA hospital in Lyons, New Jersey, and the VA Hospital in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and its clinic in Allentown, all facilities where I as a disabled veteran of the Korean War am treated.

And yet Bush and his Administration cut veterans benefits severely at the very time he insists on sending America's military into harms way. U.S. veterans are still being treated for Agent Orange-inflicted injuries from Viet Nam. When I was a patient in VA hospitals in Swannanoa and Oteen, North Carolina, outside Asheville, in the mid-1950's, recovering from service-connected tuberculosis, many of the patients had been there since World War I, lungs ruined by mustard gas while fighting in France in the war that would make the world safe for democracy.

War in Iraq could expose our soldiers to tubercle bacilli and worse. Bush recognizes this danger. It lies behind his drive to wage war in the winter, when wearing gas masks would be more comfortable for our troops than in desert sand under a triple-degree-temperature sun. This is the designer-uniform-envisioned war of Bush Chief-of-Staff Andrew Card.

Card's marketing not just the war but the uniforms in which it would be waged. Card's marketing experience dates from his days as lobbyist to Detroit's Big-Three manufacturers of SUVs. He navigated the car-makers' CEOs around environmental regulations restricting the SUVs' harmful hydrocarbon emissions, which far exceed those of standard sedans.

Our young men of draft age today aren't old enough to remember Viet Nam. But many of them are on the campus of American colleges, and they've read about the tragedy of that misguided war. It's especially fitting to me that Saturday's protest was centered in Memorial Park, near the Viet Nam Memorial. These young men, or I'm sure many of them, have also read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote not from firsthand experience, but vicariously, by interviewing patients at VA hospitals after the Civil War.