Last year at this time, the Republicans were in town and mid-town Manhattan was a locked off security zone.

We came back early from our vacation in California because we didn’t want to miss what promised to be a spirited, anti-Bush week in New York City. My husband wanted to take pictures of Republicans and New Yorkers all over the city.

We took the Red Eye home on Sunday night and missed the big, historic demonstration that spread peacefully throughout the city. We saw dozens of rainbow flags hanging heroically from Slope windows as we drove back to Third Street.

The New York media reported that anti-Bush protests were fairly light after the demonstration. But I didn’t think so. If you were in the middle of Union Square, or St. Marks Church, or on the Unemployment Line that threaded uptown from Tribecal to as near Madison Square Garden as people could go, it felt like a ground swell, a real movement.

It was a surreal week, a really special New York week. Maybe one of the best ever. It reminded me of New York in the sixties: the anti-war Be-Ins in Central Park, the moratorium marches on Broadway, near Columbia University, in Sheep’s Meadow. I was only a kid but I will never forget it.

In fact, when I was 11, Peter, Paul, and Mary asked me and my best friend to join them on stage during a protest at the UN. While they sang "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" we struggled to hold up our "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things." sign.

What I liked best about last year was the creative energy: the marathon poetry reading at St. Marks Church, the Millionaires for Bush masquerade balls, the Johnny Cash protest at Sothebys where people wore black shirts, black pants and held guitars. There was art, music, theater: all in the name of no more Bush.

The night of Bush’s convention speech, there was an unannounced event at Union Square.  My husband and I got there early to take in the atmosphere (and to take pictures).  An artist has created a solemn display of hundreds of army boots. On each boot there was the name of a soldier killed in Iraq.

My husband went up to Madison Square Garden to take pictures of what was going on. I was nervous because there was talk of violence between police and protesters. I kept calling (and annoying) him on the cell phone.

Cell phones are handy at a demonstration. Mine enabled me to meet the friends I needed to meet at Union Square. "Where are you standing," I asked. "Over by the guy with the sign that says…"

At some point, part of the crowd started running toward Madison Square Garden. I opted out of that one. The group I was with retreated to the Heartland Brewery (how ironic) for some beer on that steamy August night. Someone in our group tried to get the bartender change the TVs from MTV to the convention (we’d heard that some protesters had actually gotten inside the garden). But they didn’t change the channel. Most of the people at the bar seemed oblivious to the convention and what was going on outside.

Now, a year later, it is impossible to be oblivious to what’s going on. There’s a quagmire in Iraq.  Bush is president for another three years and the floodwaters in New Orleans are still roof high.

More than any of last year’s protests or election speeches, this tragic event in the Gulf Coast illustrates what’s wrong with our country. It exposes the poverty and racism that lurk just below the surface. Financial policies that deprive working people of what they need also meant a $71 million cut in a project that might have protected the 17th Street Levee.

A president whose main focus has been homeland security, finally cancelled his summer vacation days after the hurricaine. What a disgrace. Clearly, local and federal agencies had given little thought to worse case scenarios. 

I guess they’ve been so busy  denying civil rights in the name of homeland security, that they haven’t had much time to figure out what to do if….