Any time we declare "war" on something, we have to accept that war involves the necessity of suppressing freedoms and dissent, and encouraging bigotry. This fantasy of a righteous war in which nobody gets nasty at home has got to go.

So the next time you decide to support a liberal war, say, the "war on AIDS," think about that. Try to believe the stories of women and children leaving the country to avoid mandatory medical care by extremely toxic drugs. Try to listen long enough to find out that Africa is not a hotbed of sexual promiscuity, and that to portray it as such is bluntly racist. Try to seek out the cries of anguished people watching their loved ones die of liver and heart damage from the current recommended treatments--because you are not going to hear them on network TV or mainstream newspapers. Not even in Salon. Try to get beyond the rah-rah rally on how we all love each other and want to cure AIDS compassionately and nonviolently, because it's bullshit. This is war, and war is violent.

Or is that too much work, actually applying thought to the matter when it's all been "decided" for us that it's cool, hip and compassionate to support the AIDS war?

Having grown up entirely in the pot belt of southern Michigan, part of that time as the daughter of a night club owner, I knew at close range the people who were being maligned as "hippies" and subversives. There they were, passing around a bottle of Boone's Farm and a joint, hastening the downfall of civilization in the full presence of little ones like me. Or hanging out around the bong at our house on a Sunday afternoon. My parents' 1972 dining-room stash alone, packed neatly in a Baggie, could have supplied my current Brooklyn neighborhood with those little foil packs it now pays so dearly for, one of which fell from the roof of my freezer during the 2003 blackout as an unintentional parting gift from a former roommate. There's nothing more normal than grass showing up in my middle-class world. And I don't even generally smoke the stuff.

These days I meet AIDS subversives and notice that they are completely sane, rational, and compassionate people. Just like those "hippies" who actually posed no threat whatsoever to the true American way of life.

Thanks for considering such victims of war hysteria as worthy of our compassion. How about some tea and sympathy for the victims of AIDS-war hysteria?

Give www.virusmyth.com just a little bit of your time, and you may find out some things you didn't know.

And I'm not responding to any letters about this letter, so have fun trashing it, folks.

. . . it's the humor. Keeping society stratified, organized, together. United We Stand. Tommy Chong crossed that line, and hats off to him for staying there. In totalitarianism, the first people sent away are the clowns.

Thanks to Tommy Chong for his thoughts on "legalization." I never thought about it that way before. I hate cigarette smoke. I hate it on a beautiful, fresh summer day when I'm walking to work, and I hate it in restaurants, bars and sidewalk cafes. I just plain hate it. So I'm absolutely sure I don't want to get a contact high from the street. I know it would take more than a whiff of the stuff, but at certain places, legalization (which I otherwise support) might bring a no-limits kind of thinking.

How about a pot-smoking section of each public park, downwind from the straights? And big signs in public saying, "No Smoking . . . of any kind." Even by Tommy Chong.

He lives in all of us . . .

OK, enough of the cornball stuff, but he does indeed live in me. The Mike Douglas Show educated me on American culture more than anything before or since. Catching it after school in the '70s because, well, our choices were limited back then, I remember:

A tiny Tiger Woods putting with Bob Hope, and Alice Cooper putting with Spiro Agnew;

Ruth Gordon complimenting Patti Smith on her originality;

Hearing ABBA and the Pointer Sisters for the first time;

Bizarre comments from Anita Bryant, who was just beginning her crusade against gays;

and assorted other memories that surface from time to time.

You just don't get that on Letterman.

God bless Mike Douglas. He explained it all for you, and helped you remember that it didn't matter who was right or wrong, cool or straight, or from whatever generation -- only that civility ruled. I feel truly sorry for the kids and younger adults of today, who have never experienced that.